Automation lagging

Last year, Ubisense surveyed 252 manufacturing engineers, product designers and quality management professionals in its 2014 Smart Manufacturing Technologies Survey and uncovered some surprising results. While the survey does not explicitly reference Australian manufacturers, it may well be that Australian manufacturing would be similar in response.

The survey revealed that lack of visibility into manufacturing processes is the most prevalent issue plaguing manufacturers today. It seems that 40% of manufacturers have no visibility into the real-time status of their manufacturing processes.

Visibility is crucial for process improvement and control, but its value is far more fundamental. According to responses from the survey, nearly 10% of factories spend half their day simply looking for equipment and products. This non-value-added time can result in significant wastage. For example, a few minutes spent finding each vehicle in a heavy vehicle plant can accumulate to several hundred thousand dollars in lost inventory costs annually.

Industry 4.0, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT), introduces cyber-physical systems in which machines communicate with each other and their users, digitally and in real time, and factory processes become visible and controllable in virtual space.

In this revolution, legions of networked sensors connect to intelligent data analytics in the cloud to create cyber-physical systems capable of sophisticated real-time decision-making. Supply chains can automatically adjust based on changes in demand or production capacity, and products can communicate to machines about how they should be processed.

The manufacturing world may be talking about Industry 4.0, but Ubisense’s survey shows that most manufacturers are far from embracing the cyber-physical systems which define the 4th Industrial Revolution. In fact, most factories have yet to embrace Industry 3.0, the automation age.

Eighty per cent of survey respondents said they rely on team observations to support process improvement initiatives. This means the majority of manufacturers rely on subjective, rather than objective, data when making changes to their manufacturing processes.

In fact, only 16% of respondents indicated that they rely on sensors that measure process flow and provide objective data. This lack of data may be a contributing factor in the challenge to optimise production. The lack of flow optimisation is evident when 54% of respondents reported that up to 10% of cycle time per product is non-value-added process waste.

Furthermore, in operations where products may run through a repair or rework process, the survey revealed that almost 15% of manufacturers don’t prioritise product repairs at all. The repair process is one which typically receives far less technology investment than the primary manufacturing process but can be a source of significant waste.

Manufacturers need to focus on automating their systems and gaining a more valuable, objective level of visibility so they can better optimise their workflow and reduce errors in their processes.

Additional survey findings

• While 40% have no visibility into the real-time status of their company’s manufacturing process, 30% of manufacturers do have access to instant, real-time status of every product.
• 56% of manufacturers are using the limited visibility data they have to identify problems as they occur, meaning that over half of respondents only know about crises after they happen.
• 40% of manufacturers are leveraging their visibility data to try to identify problems before they occur. In these situations, frontline managers can be much more proactive by identifying a pending stoppage and making adjustments in advance to maintain flow.

Ubisense operates in the vehicle and industrial manufacturing arena where its ‘Smart Factory’ uses real-time location data and other owned data from manufacturing and enterprise systems to give manufacturers process visibility. While the survey did not explicitly cover Australian manufacturers, one is left wondering how many Australian manufacturers are still struggling with achieving current technological levels of process automation, let alone moving on to Industry 4.0.