COTS technology reduces cost and increases competitiveness

The main trends in manufacturing today are the needs to reduce costs and increase competitiveness. As a result, many Australian manufacturers are moving manufacturing facilities offshore. One good example is the Australian automotive industry, which has shrunk incredibly over the last five years. While offshore manufacturing addresses cost reduction, companies need to make this transition as efficient and manageable as possible, while also preserving key IP and knowledge in Australia.

I see two significant technological developments that will improve operations for offshore manufacturing. These technologies on the one hand provide desired throughput and deal with the convergence of technologies built into today’s products, while on the other deliver remote management and control of production systems.

The first trend is the increasing use of sophisticated manufacturing testing platforms that allow engineers to easily build test systems, and to provide testing during manufacturing, along with remote control and maintenance.

The other important trend is to shorten the time between design, prototyping and production. Based on NI’s experiences with graphical system design, some significant reductions in time-to-market and development costs have been achieved simply by leveraging the same tools among different departments and locations. By providing common tool sets, companies can easily continue to design and prototype locally, and easily migrate to the deployment and production phase overseas.

In Australia, quite a large portion of industry is driven by the mining and processing industries. These industries often operate in very remote areas and under extreme conditions. Their main objectives as far as we understand them are to optimise production and employee safety, and to increase the use of autonomous operations wherever possible. Technologies that address these main objectives need to provide tremendous ruggedness, reliability, processing power and networking capabilities.

In the past, many applications have been solved by custom-built technologies that were very costly and lacked flexibility in their adoption of new technologies. Today’s trends indicate the adoption of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies with real-time operating systems and built in user-programmability, as well as a large variety of different I/O and networking capabilities. These newer systems, through their programmable capabilities, provide the flexibility to apply different signal processing and complex control algorithms. COTS technology powered by high-level software tools provides an extremely powerful platform with the capacity to solve numerous upcoming applications in the mining, processing and automation industries.

Another important trend in the mining and processing industries is the adoption of wireless sensor networks technologies. These technologies provide a large variety of networking possibilities over longer distances with local processing and storage capabilities, and are an ideal component for large monitoring applications in remote areas where cabling is not an option. These technologies will play an important role in the future, and increased investment in this area will provide all the tools and technologies needed to integrate wireless sensor networks with existing monitoring, control and embedded systems.