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May 21, 2024May 21, 2024

Why Indian Manufacturing Companies Lag Behind in Embracing Digitization?

In an era where digital transformation is reshaping industries worldwide, the manufacturing sector stands at the forefront of this revolution. However, while many global players swiftly embrace digital technologies to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and stay competitive, Indian manufacturing companies seem to be trailing behind in digitization. This article examines the underlying causes of this hesitation and highlights the tangible losses incurred by delaying digital integration.

1. Overcoming Resistance to Change

A major roadblock in the path of digital adoption in Indian manufacturing is the deep-rooted preference for traditional methods. Perfected over decades, these practices form the backbone of current operations, making the shift to digital solutions appear daunting. The apprehension is further fueled by stakeholders’ fears of potential disruptions and the unpredictability of new technology outcomes. Overcoming this resistance requires a cultural shift in viewing technology as an enabler rather than a disruptor.

2. Lack of Awareness and Education

Another significant barrier to digitization in Indian manufacturing is the lack of awareness and education regarding the benefits and implications of adopting digital technologies. Many companies may not fully comprehend how digitalization can revolutionize their operations, improve productivity, and unlock new growth opportunities. Moreover, limited exposure to successful digital transformation case studies further contributes to scepticism and reluctance.

3. Infrastructure Challenges

The success of digitalization initiatives relies heavily on robust infrastructure, including high-speed internet connectivity, advanced hardware, and secure data storage facilities. In India, while urban centres may boast adequate infrastructure, rural areas and smaller manufacturing hubs often lack the necessary technological infrastructure to support digitalization efforts. This digital divide exacerbates the challenges faced by companies outside metropolitan regions, impeding their ability to embrace digital transformation fully.

4. Cost Considerations

For many Indian manufacturing companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), cost considerations significantly deter digitalization. The initial investment required to implement digital technologies, such as IoT devices, robotics, and automation systems, can be substantial. Additionally, concerns about ongoing maintenance costs and the return on investment further dampen enthusiasm for digitization, particularly among cash-strapped enterprises.

The Cost of Inaction

The hesitancy to embrace digital technologies results in several missed opportunities and competitive disadvantages:

1. Declining Competitiveness:

Companies that fail to embrace digital technologies risk falling behind their global counterparts in terms of productivity, efficiency, and innovation. Without digitalization, Indian manufacturers may struggle to compete effectively in the international market, losing out on potential customers and revenue streams.

2. Inefficiencies and Operational Challenges:

Manual and outdated processes often result in inefficiencies, errors, and production delays. Without digitization, manufacturers may continue to grapple with bottlenecks, supply chain disruptions, and quality control issues, leading to increased costs and decreased customer satisfaction.

3. Limited Scalability and Growth:

Digital technologies enable manufacturing companies to scale operations efficiently, diversify product offerings, and adapt to changing market demands. Without embracing digitization, Indian manufacturers may find it challenging to expand their businesses, explore new markets, and seize growth opportunities, thereby limiting their long-term sustainability and profitability.

The path to digital empowerment for Indian manufacturing is fraught with challenges but also rich with opportunity. By addressing the core issues of resistance, awareness, infrastructure, and cost, the sector can redefine its operational paradigms and secure a competitive position in the global arena. As we move forward, embracing these changes not only enhances efficiency but also ensures sustainable growth and innovation in a digitally connected world. To remain competitive in today’s digital age, Indian manufacturers must overcome these barriers and prioritize investments in digital technologies to drive innovation, enhance productivity, and secure their position in the global market.

January 24, 2024February 11, 2024

Chem 4.0 simplified with open architecture platform

What can Industry 4.0 Platforms do for The Chemical Industry?

The developers can also use the data in real-time to deliver mission-critical use-cases with lightning speed and accurate analysis, thus preventing the companies from investing in expensive cloud-heavy platforms.

Organizations focused on enhancing their business operations can use the technology to improve their overall productivity and reduce potential risks. While it can also be used to generate new revenue streams for enterprises aiming to achieve non-linear growth.

“Brabo, a platform of platforms, developed by a European technology company, Solulever, aims to reduce the OT-IT costs for the plants by at least 30% with a quick value realization within a period of 6 to 9 months.”

Chemical plants can increase their productivity through smart manufacturing techniques such as process control, predictive asset management, product simulations, and connected worker solutions focusing on the empowerment of operations & creating a paperless shop floor.

Brabo lets you model your entire manufacturing site on a Digital Asset Family Framework to visualize asset utilization & critical asset KPIs. It also performs real-time anomaly detection. It has preconfigured chemical manufacturing asset templates for common equipment such as reactors.

However, enhancing the productivity and efficiency of the plant, comes at a cost as companies need to invest in technologically advanced infrastructure to support their operations, manage huge datasets and provide real-time data for analytics.

Its GUI is based on a no-code platform, making it easy for even the non-technical members of the plant to create site models & asset dashboards to run the operations seamlessly.

Brabo, The Edge Platform For Your Chemical Plants

Being an open architecture platform, it provides businesses with the flexibility to purchase the hardware and software solutions specifically suited to their business, saving them from making unnecessary investments into middleware, ESBs, historians, gateways, SCADA systems, etc.

Using the open architecture platforms, the chemical sector can bank upon the opportunity of digital transformation for accelerated growth, without having to incur additional costs. Brabo Edge Platform®, a Manufacturing Connectivity & Intelligence platform is one such solution that the industry needs to empower its operations and to create a foundation for digital manufacturing transformation.

Take your chemical business various notches up in terms of increased efficiency and reliability delivering business benefits from bottom to top, by integrating the latest Edge solutions, Brabo!

The product is built on Modern Microservices architecture to offer comprehensive OT-IT data integrations aimed towards realizing faster time-to-value for Chemical 4.0 use cases. As the essential data is stored and processed on the edge, real-time data can be fed back to the equipment and machines to develop real-time closed-loop systems.

January 24, 2024February 11, 2024

Digital Transformation in Manufacturing Operations – A beautiful dream, difficult to realize

Digital Transformation is the new game in town for many industries. The concept comes in many shapes and forms for the target industry/consumer where the essential goal is to improve efficiency, value, or innovation by adoption of digital technology.

At Solulever, an Industry 4.0 based Dutch Software Startup, we have built a unique platform for the effective transformation of manufacturing operations. The platform is built to make the Digitization of Manufacturing operations simple, fast, affordable and fun.

Some of the concerns around the alternative approaches that the platform solves are:

Product Fitment

Every provider starts with its own interpretation of the problem, then solves it using its own opinion of what the correct solution should be. However, based on customers’ feedback, the provider generalizes that solution, starting by being configuration oriented, and later evolving it into another product with customized interface. A good example is Amazon, which started as a bookstore and later generalized to e-commerce and then evolved to customized category management.

However, to implement on scale, with more generalization or abstraction in each iteration, biases introduced due to opinions of product management and engineering teams can lead to predetermining product behavior on behalf of the customer. Such predeterminations can lead to gaps between the behavior of the solution expected by the customer and the actual behavior of the solution offered by the provider.

Technical Fitment –

Most IoT stacks are opinionated by the needs of the company building the IoT stack. For example, Cloud Hyperscalers are quite heavy on the cloud compute, and they assume that the end device will be very low in compute, memory etc. This opinion strongly correlates with the devices they provide in the B2C or B2B space. However, in cases where the edge devices are powerful or in situations where connectivity itself is not given, a cloud centric approach can be a misfit. Instead, a powerful edge with capability to compute, should be utilized for analytics, advanced workloads such as machine learning, and training models.
Also, it is worth noting that while these providers are experimenting with edge based analytical innovations for their own products & devices, these providers are not amenable to exposing these capabilities fully to communities for open integration. A non-committal approach towards Open-Integrations by these providers amplifies this problem even further, where even credible System Integrators struggle to use the offerings of these providers.

Total Cost of Ownership

Most cloud models are very cost friendly towards ingress, but charge a lot more towards egress, which means that while it is very easy to get your data in, it is much harder to get it out. Similarly, design of such managed databases (particularly timeseries databases), is oriented towards charging the users on both the data kept in the table, as well as on the data scanned in each query and/ or query processing time. While this model gives very benign costs initially, it leads to an explosion of cost, with gradual but considerable scale-up of the costs involved, not just over number of devices but also over time. This leads to solutions being deemed not worthy of the cost they’re incurring and hence getting ditched.
To solve the above pain points, we identified the need for a platform like Brabo Edge Platform®.

We started by working on the following:

Platform Thinking

Instead of just thinking about a particular use case, we started by acknowledging the vast technology landscape involved. We wanted to build a platform that not only supports cloud but also on-premises deployments. In essence, a platform capable of consuming multiple data sources from Informational Technology and Operational Technology landscape was identified.

Also, a device framework service formed an essential ingredient to support device provisioning and device management across multiple protocols like OPC-UA, Modbus, Ethernet/IP etc. And of course, state-of-the-art analytics and dashboarding capabilities were a must-have too. We also architected for Cost Efficiency, Open-Integration philosophy, High Availability, Load-based scaling, state-of-the-art security implementation etc.

Finally, we wanted to include an option for our customers to procure an Optimized Engineered Appliance and hence avoid the hassles of fine-tuning the hardware for performance on their own. To achieve this tall order, we started by focusing on the right architecture and technology stack.

Focus on the Right Technology

We started by defining key technical components. On Infrastructure, since we had multiple deployment scenarios and an extensive breadth in technologies used, containers were essential. We use microservices written in Java, Python, JS etc. We use Kubernetes to manage our deployments both in cloud, as well as on our own Edge appliances, while gateways run Docker based services. We used Linux everywhere as much as possible, but wherever needed, our microservices were nimble enough to allow us to use Windows as well for supporting legacy integrations. We also provide a restricted sandbox for our customers, where they can deploy their services and can interact with our microservices as well.

Next, we focused on data pipeline using Kafka, which acts as a message queue & broker for our services, while also providing a wide ecosystem of allied solutions. This further helps in the development of our data processing services and analytical engine, and we also allow our customers to connect and consume Kafka topics, thus truly being on an Open Architecture. We also switched to gRPC, which though seems to be a highly opinionated move initially, but is a well suited one, as it enables bi-directional streaming APIs, along with the ability to generate client code.
While code generation is possible on REST using technologies like OpenAPI, bi-directional streaming support with fast serialization is a game changer, which is not efficiently possible in REST.

For timeseries and relational data, we use TimescaleDB, which allows us to use SQL everywhere, enabling superior performance and supporting scale of a million data points per second. TimescaleDB provides great support for continuous aggregation, data compression, data retention policies, and even hybrid data storage. We also use multi-node deployments in extremely high throughput scenarios to achieve the desired performance. We use Redis and MongoDB in various use cases as well.

Cost Efficiency

We have a multi-pronged cost rationalization approach. Not only do we use leverage the relevant Open-Source developments to reduce our costs, but we also make use of containers and Kubernetes, to increase our compute density and achieve high utilization of resources.
Further, we prefer commodity hardware servers, designing reliability into the services and software rather than the hardware, thus reducing our cost footprint on the hardware. Finally, our open data platform ideology allows us to reuse data between services using Kafka and gRPC, and we prefer stream processing over batch processing to reduce peak utilization and hardware requirement ceiling further.

Additionally, TimescaleDB allows us to compress data more than 20X in our real-world observations while improving the performance at the same time.

Conclusion

By learning from the shortcomings of other platforms and adopting the best possible technical solutions currently possible, we’ve built a platform that is capable of successful digital manufacturing operations transformation delivery at a substantially low cost. In future, we’d like to discuss further in depth how Brabo handles OT-IT Data integrations and mashups, & what technical challenges we’ve overcome to realize this platform. Stay tuned!

January 24, 2024February 11, 2024

Unblocking the commercial barriers for Industry 4.0 adoption in Chemical Manufacturing

“Industry 4.0 revolution brings unmatched opportunities for the Chemical industry to dramatically reduce the cost of production, increase business agility, embrace the vision of an integrated supply chain, and more. The digital transformation of manufacturing operations is rapidly becoming mainstream, with its direct impact on a company’s bottom line and competitive positioning.”

However, the economics of Smart Manufacturing technologies is complex and forbidding for the majority of the industry. A typical technology footprint needed to enable Digital Manufacturing involves investments into middleware technologies, integration technologies, historians (time-series databases), gateways, SCADA systems, Industrial IoT (IIoT) platforms, analytical platforms, hyperscalers, development environments, etc.

Most of these technology components are metered based on data volumes and the number of integration points – so the more the number of machines/data sources you connect, the more you pay.

At the same time, typical cloud-based IIoT platforms are metered on storage-based, per-month pricing models, making scalability over the long term a challenge. The entry barriers for small or less-profitable sites are tall and prohibitory – be it for an SME or the smaller units of a larger Chemical enterprise. The enterprise struggles equally to justify the business case over a 5-year term (or longer), with the annual spending spiralling up every year and business benefits dipping for even the largest and the most profitable sites.

“Hence the need for a technologically advanced solution that could digitize manufacturing operations with a more straightforward, flexible, and scalable business & commercial model is imminent. “

Brabo is one such state-of-the-art solution for the digital manufacturing needs of the industry. The open standards and microservices architecture-based software is a platform of platforms meticulously engineered by the in-house team of maverick technologists at Solulever, a European Digital Manufacturing Software Platform company.

Brabo is a Manufacturing Connectivity & Intelligence platform that lets chemical manufacturers embrace digitization across all their manufacturing sites, irrespective of size, the current state of technology, investment appetite, OEM landscape, or digital maturity of the respective sites. It cuts the layers of technology components otherwise needed to build digital and automation use cases.

The Digital Manufacturing platform provides a plug-and-play possibility to Connect (any data source), Contextualize (production data over any business parameter), Analyze (assets/processes in real-time or post facto), React (to events, alarms & drive automation), and Historize (data for audits & historical reporting).

The platform’s microservices architecture lets an enterprise build digital roadmaps differently for distinct manufacturing sites based on the scale and speed best suited to them.

“Brabo comes bundled with a highly intuitive and configurable ‘Asset Studio’ and ‘Process Studio’ suite of configurable use-cases.”

In a matter of a few days, these applications/analytics can be configured for an enterprise to deliver business value in asset utilization, material efficiency, quality management, process improvement, and more.For enterprises wanting to build custom applications and analytics, the platform delivers an integrated development environment and unlimited APIs to export to other platforms/ environments. This futuristic Industry 4.0 platform uses no other third-party license component, thus containing the price and avoiding any unpleasant surprises in the future for its customers. Built on a Hybrid architecture (Edge and Cloud), Brabo is delivered in two models : (1) ‘Brabo Edge Platform’ (BEP), which is better suited for large and super-large Chemical enterprises, and (2) ‘Brabo Factory Cloud’ (BFC), better suited for medium and small scale Chemical enterprises.

The Edge variant (BEP) is capable of delivering real-time and closed-loop (automation) use cases at high volumes (performance tested for up to 1 Million data points per second ingestion) and high speed (less than 500 milliseconds closed loop). BEP can optionally be delivered as an Appliance (an engineered Edge Server hardware preloaded with BEP). Solulever offers the flexibility of choosing between ‘per-site per-month pricing and ‘per-site perpetual’ pricing options for BEP. There is no extra licensing based on the number of equipment/data sources connected, inbound/ outbound integration points, data volume/ speed, use cases, etc. The cloud variant (BFC) is delivered along with a lightweight edge gateway, which is used to transmit data between a manufacturing plant and a cloud. BFC is offered on a ‘per-machine per month’ pricing model, with entry requirements as low as ten machines. BFC lets you fully digitize your shop-floor operations in 2 to 6 weeks.

Being the most coveted solution for transforming your chemical manufacturing business, Brabo is the go-to product to make your enterprise steer through the competition and embrace the Industry 4.0 revolution.

January 24, 2024February 21, 2024

Industry 4.0 and the Sustainability Goals of the Manufacturing Sector

“Compared to other sectors, the industrial sector uses maximum delivered energy – 54% of the total global energy consumption. Within the industrial sector, the manufacturing industry ranks as the highest energy consumer, followed by the mining, construction, and agricultural sectors. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the percentage share of industrial energy consumption by the manufacturing sector was 77% in the year 2020.”

As environmental concerns continue to rise globally, majority of the industries, enterprises, and governments have started taking serious initiatives toward the reduction of their carbon footprint. Several countries including the UK, France, New Zealand, and Norway signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, with an ambition to reach net-zero emissions by the year 2050.

India aims to reduce its projected carbon footprint by 1 billion tonnes by the year 2030. Their ambition is to meet more than 50% of its energy requirement through renewable energy by this time. The US has set a target to reach 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by the year 2035.

The issue of sustainability is prime for the manufacturing sector. Governments in different countries are taking steps to incentivize sustainable manufacturing and accelerate the transition to a circular economy. Even from an internal cost perspective, energy is a significant cost component in the manufacturing world and there is an ever-pressing need to optimize it for gaining a competitive edge in the market.

Technology has always played a big role in the efforts toward energy optimization. The recent developments in the Industry 4.0 space, have taken the potential of data-led initiatives several notches higher in this direction.

For example – real-time energy monitoring and energy control-oriented analytics are particularly of great value. Having said that, careful use of technology is a must to avoid these initiatives becoming counter-productive.

Most of the solutions in this space require increased use of connected devices, which in turn leads to additional energy consumption.

The steps to leverage data for energy optimization are to :

Record:

To create a baseline and to monitor energy consumption continuously, manufacturers need technologies that establish holistic connectivity on the shop floor, especially with the production equipment, supporting devices, energy meters, IoT sensors etc. Complexities here are majorly around the variety of communication protocols involved, a broad spectrum of integration needed, data volumes/velocity/variety, and OEM restriction, to name a few.

Analyze :

Depending on the use case envisioned, manufacturers may require both or either ‘real-time’ and ‘post-facto’ analytical possibilities. It is also needed to have a real-time feed from IT systems for analyzing energy consumption around business variables like Batch ID, SKU number, Customer ID, Raw Material etc. Therefore a strong & real-time OT-IT integration becomes a must-have. Further, the co-relation of data between energy meters and shop-floor machines is of absolute importance to create a granular mapping of how asset and process parameter fluctuation can lead to variable energy consumption per batch per SKU etc.

Improvise :

The insights from analytics pave the way for timely actions towards improvement, optimization and cost avoidance. The insights are generally suggestive and need to be acted upon at speed by stakeholders like operators, plant supervisors, automation engineers, plant management, continuous improvement team etc. Once a good level of confidence is established in the insights, closed-loop systems can be implemented to automate the actions towards energy optimization and proactive cost avoidance.

“Brabo Edge Platform® is one of the recent developments which helps manufacturers achieve the ambitions spelt above and beyond”

Brabo is a Manufacturing Connectivity & Intelligence platform developed by Solulever, a Dutch software startup, with an exclusive focus on the topic of Digital Manufacturing. Brabo is built on open integration, OT-first, Hybrid, Microservices and Headless architectural principles. These architectural choices make Brabo standout in the market, in terms of its comprehensive connectivity, high flexibility, intense scalability and extreme performance, while suiting almost any variety of OT/IT tech landscape existing in a manufacturing plant.

The business value derived by the manufacturing operations ranges across the areas of asset utilization, material efficiency, quality improvement, energy optimization, sustainable manufacturing, operator enablement, labor efficiency, process improvement, service management and more.

Specific to the topic of Energy Optimization, Brabo delivers end-to-end capabilities to Record – Analyze and Improvise. With its comprehensive and OEM-independent connectivity framework, Brabo reads real-time energy parameters from all the energy-consuming and energy-measurement devices on a shop floor. Similarly, Brabo seamlessly connects to IT systems like ERP, Recipe Management System, Lab Information Management Systems (LIMS) etc., and delivers real-time streams of OT data contextualized with business parameters from the IT systems.

Since Brabo can integrate with the energy meters and production assets in an OEM-independent fashion, it can analyze the needed data and help manufacturers optimize KPIs like Specific Energy Consumption (SEC), kWh per ton etc. The powerful, real-time streaming and analytics capabilities of the platform enable developers to build custom use cases in no time and without needing skills in any special proprietary technologies. The platform has its own Historian implementation, which allows for ‘store & analyze’ capabilities needed for any ETL or post-facto analytics operations. Since Brabo integrates down to the OT level, it can directly feed the corrective interventions to the energy-consuming and energy-measurement devices – thus enabling automation in the energy optimization agenda.

Brabo follows a well-balanced approach between Edge and Cloud. In large-size-plant situations, the majority of capabilities are rendered on the Edge (on-premise) side. Being close to the source of data origin and to the destination of analytics consumption, this approach avoids the latency and connectivity challenges, that are typical deterrents to real-time analytics and automation possibilities (like in pure-cloud models).

Also, an Edge-heavy model is commercially better suited for large plants, which have high data volumes and prefer avoiding the tall costs of cloud storage. At the same time, the cloud side in Brabo’s Hybrid architecture is used for cross-plant benchmarking and reporting purposes.

The weight of Edge versus Cloud reverses in smaller plant situations, where the data volumes are much lesser and the use-cases are more post-facto and cross-plant in nature. This balanced Hybrid model also means that the overall carbon footprint of the solution is minimal.

This revolution of new-age platforms like Brabo opens up a whole new range of possibilities for the manufacturing world to realize its sustainability goals. The added, yet significant, benefit also includes the differentiated competitive advantage manufacturers gain from the associated reduction in their cost of manufacturing.

Stay tuned to read more about this revolution in the making!