Getting on the Path to

Smart Manufacturing
Companies that adopt smart manufacturing will earn global,
long-term competitive advantages.

Smart manufacturing focuses on

dramatic advances in integrating
information, technology and human
ingenuity,
explains
Rockwell
Automation Chief Technology Officer
Sujeet Chand. The concept is evolving
rapidly as companies seek ever-more
sophisticated ways to develop and
apply manufacturing intelligence
real-time data sensing and collection,
high-performance computer analysis,
and advanced modeling and simulation
to every stage of manufacturing, from
product invention through design,
sourcing, production and delivery.
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April 2011 AUTOMATION TODAY ASIA PACIFIC

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Suppliers

Smart
Grid

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Factory

Optimization

Defining Smart Manufacturing

Ente
Enterprise
Bu
Business
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Systems

Plantwide

n Gujarat, India, Tata Motors Ltd.

built a US$417 million factory with
several advanced manufacturing
attributes to manufacture its marketchanging Tata Nano, the worlds
least expensive car, selling at under
US$3,000 in India. The company has
announced plans to release versions of
the Nano at market-disruptive prices
throughout the world.
The factory in India was designed
to incorporate smart manufacturing
technologies at every turn, enabling
the company to accept custom orders
from dealers and adapt on the spot
to customers preferences. Those same
technologies will allow the company
to track every part to its source,
quickly identifying and addressing any
quality or safety problems that could
arise. Additionally, when smart grids
become available, the factory will be
ready to connect to them to optimise
production to times that energy is
most plentiful or least expensive.
Tata Motors is one of a growing number
of companies that is changing the way it
conducts business and competes in the
competitive global marketplace. It is
striving to harness smart manufacturing
technology to energise innovation,
address cost and structural challenges,
achieve environmental sustainability
goals and drive competitive advantage.

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Pro
Su
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ly C
ha
ins

OEM
Machine
Builders

Most industry leaders and observers

agree that the crucial components of
smart manufacturing include a highly
skilled, adaptable workforce; extensive
collection, sharing and analysis of
information across the entire project
life cycle; and powerful computer
analytics utilising contemporary highperformance computing technology.
With
smart
manufacturing,
industries will cut the average cost
of manufacturing in key sectors and
ramp up exports. They will also gain
time-to-market flexibility as smart
manufacturing profoundly alters
production time lines.

Three Phases of Evolution

Chand
notes
that
smart
manufacturing will evolve in three
phases. In its first phase, smart
manufacturing will interconnect and
better harmonise individual stages of
manufacturing production to advance
plant-wide efficiency.
A typical manufacturing plant uses
information technology, sensors, motors/
actuators, computerised controls,
production management software and
the like to manage each specific stage or
operation of a manufacturing process.

Distribution
Center

Consumers

However, each is an island of efficiency.

Smart manufacturing will integrate
these islands, enabling data sharing
throughout the plant. The convergence
between machine-gathered data and
human intelligence will advance plantwide optimisation and enterprise-wide
management objectives, including
substantial increases in economic
performance, worker safety and
environmental sustainability. The
emergence of this manufacturing
intelligence will usher in the second
phase of smart manufacturing.
This second phase involves
connecting in-plant modeling and data
technologies with high-performance
computing platforms, which will make
it possible to build significantly higher
levels of manufacturing intelligence
and connect it throughout the
factory. Complete production lines
and entire plants will run with realtime flexibility which is not feasible
now in order to conserve energy and
otpmise outputs.
Businesses will be able to develop
advanced models and simulations of
manufacturing processes to improve
current and future operations. For
instance, companies will be able

The Benefits of
Smart Manufacturing
Consumers will reap several
tangible
benefits
from
smart
manufacturing
as
it
delivers
innovations in products, information
and design to the marketplace.
Detailed materials tracking at every
stage made possible by standards
that link information throughout
the supply chain will increase the
precision of product safety monitoring
and will reduce incident responses
from months to minutes.
That same tracking, from raw
materials to delivered goods, will
hand consumers vast power in making
point-of-purchase customisation of
products as well as detailed
assessments of the environmental
footprint of their choices. It will
also automate regulatory and other
government reporting, increasing the
level of detail provided in reports while
reducing taxpayer-funded costs of
manual tracking and data collection.
Manufacturing
intelligence
combined with advanced modeling
and simulation will enable inventors,
engineers, plant managers and
operators to collaborate in designing
and manufacturing new products,
especially those featuring clean

energy, low carbon footprints and

new technology. This level of progress
will enable the precise models needed
for the manufacture of products and
devices that use nanotechnology
which will have even more profound
effects on every aspect of our lives
than did the invention of microchips
and microprocessors.
In addition, the knowledge businesses
gain through process innovations
will transfer far beyond the doors of
manufacturing into the services sector
at every level, delivering better pricing
through improved process efficiency
and economies of scale. That knowledge
transfer will, in turn, yield broader use
of smart manufacturing technology
the application of new technology and
new information to disparate fields.
Smart manufacturing will reshape
industry at the most fundamental
levels, explains Chand. Its promise
far exceeds the incremental and
limited, albeit important, advances in
operational management and waste
reduction that industries captured
through lean initiatives in past
decades. Within the next decade,
smart manufacturing will transform
the entire manufacturing process,
from invention and raw materials to
delivery and sales. AT

Source: Tata Motors Ltd.

to develop models for the massmanufacture of products and devices that

use nanotechnology, the development
of ultra-miniaturised, highly complex
devices, systems and materials.
Nanotechnology is widely expected to
revolutionise technology and industry
with smaller, stronger, lighter weight
materials and powerful precision
devices for nearly every industry.
The second phase of smart
manufacturing also will connect
factory-specific information to data
throughout the supply chain, from raw
material availability and customer
demand through the delivery of
finished goods. It will facilitate the
use of smart grids to schedule energyintensive activities during lowdemand periods and slow production
during peak energy demands. It will
enable greater product customisation,
new product simulations and new,
more efficient processes. It will
support the production of safer
products and precisely defined, faster
product tracking.
As
manufacturing
intelligence
grows, smart manufacturing, in this
third phase, will inspire innovations
in processes and products that result
in major market disruptions, such as
a US$3,000 automobile or a US$300
personal computer. It will reverse the
flow of established industrial supply
chains that forced consumers to accept
whatever was mass-produced.
Instead, flexible factories and
demand-driven supply chains will
change manufacturing processes
to allow companies to customise
products to individual needs, such as
medications with specific dosages and
formulations. Customers will tell
a factory what car to manufacture,
what features to build into a personal
computer or how to tailor a pair of
jeans for a perfect fit.
This most dramatic, and competitively
vital, third phase of implementing
smart manufacturing will come from
innovation spurred by this growing
body of manufacturing knowledge.
Companies will not see incremental or
gradual changes: they will see gamechanging, market-disruptive innovations
in products and processes. Changes at
this phase will push down prices, open
new markets and offer a broader array
of choices to a wider range of people.

Tata Motors Ltd. incorporated smart manufacturing technologies in the production of

the Tata Nano, the worlds least expensive car.

AUTOMATION TODAY ASIA PACIFIC April 2011

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