An Overview on Digital Factory
As the world progresses today, a major part of this progress has been digitalization. Digitization is at large changing the face of industries. It has transformed the manufacturing process of the industries, as now industries use innovative technologies which require less but skilled human resource for its functioning.
Gone are the days when the manufacturing products was a head aching task and literally involved giving your blood and sweat to it. With the advent of digitization and new technologies smart sensors, artificial intelligence, robotics, big data pools have opened a path to a new era of manufacturers and completely integrated factories that can cater to everyone’s needs and demands.
This fully digital factory can act as a catalyst in gaining larger profits. It also gives room to improvement in security, environmental sustainability, and rightsizing of global factory footprints.
Also known as Industry 4.0, the digital factory is a large network compromising of equipment from the catalog of IoT technology, integrated with the end-to-end ecosystem.
Steps Involved in Digitizing a Factory
- Defining Needs – It is very important that one decides what is the most important thing in the process of manufacturing and then decide on the factory setup likewise.
- Adaptation ability – In order to stay in demand, it is necessary that you remain flexible.
- Data Control and Analysis – The most important in all technological advancements is data. The data has to be taken advantage of by analyzing it on various channels and then making real-time decisions.
- Personalized Sales service with the facility to give after-sales service too.
- Integration of factories into the company’s digital environment – The connection and integration of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) with the Enterprise Resource Planning(ERP) give rooms to improvement. In order to create a broader digital environment, the supplier and client information should be integrated. This type of integration is known as Horizontal Integration.
Components of Digital Manufacturing:
- Product Life Cycle
- Smart Factory
- Value Chain Management
Advantages of Digital Factory
- It enhances operational efficiency with improved processes.
- Digital factory and manufacturing help eliminates silos by intertwining planning and development with the new technologies.
- It attracts and empowers the next generation of workers.
- Digital manufacturing helps improve brand awareness
- It reduces a lot of costs involved in excessive inventory.
Whether we like it or not, the era of the digital factory is here. With new and updated technologies, factories are turning hands-free. The digital factory set up would boost up the production and profit rates of the company as well as give a greater sense of satisfaction to the customers with the customized service. All in all, it is a package of good and bad. But the experts are still trying to minimize the bad impacts of the digital factory.