Empowering the Manufacturing Sector for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution in the past liberated us from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create a mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production.

The fourth industrial revolution is building itself on the third and it is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

This change will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. The most important aspect of this revolution is that it must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society.

Microsoft today showcased three marquee IoT solutions aimed at digitally transforming the Indian manufacturing industry. Powered by Azure, the Microsoft cloud, the three solutions offered by Precimetrix, Teramatrix and Covacsis are helping create digital, intelligent and predictive factories. The Precimetrix, Teramatrix, and Covacsis solutions have been deployed in leading organizations like Hero Moto Corp, Samudra LED, KEC, VE Commercial Vehicles, Godrej, TAFE, Bajaj among others.

With advanced cloud services like IoT Suite, Cortana Intelligence Suite Microsoft is enabling these partners to keep pace with the demands of the fourth industrial revolution. Rapidly changing customer preferences, hardware evolutions and managing hyper business growth are a few of the challenges Microsoft partners are addressing in the manufacturing space with the Azure, Microsoft’s cloud.

Narendra Bhandari, General Manager of Developer Experience and Evangelism at Microsoft, said, “Microsoft along with its partners is helping manufacturing industries gain insights and make better decisions. Our complete suite of technology solutions including Azure Machine Learning, Cortana Intelligence Suite, and IoT Solutions Suite as well as partners like Covacsis, Precimetrix, Teramatix, ZingHR, Knolskape among others, are capable of supporting any manufacturer of any size transform digitally. We are excited to provide the Digital transformation platform for our partners to innovate and build on our Hyper-Secure and Hyper-Scalable cloud.”

Let’s take a look at how these solutions are helping the manufacturing sector create digital factories:

Customer engagement: Covacsis

This pillar of digital transformation helps build tailored customer experiences by harnessing data and draw actionable insights to achieve a segment of one. Covacsis offers a state-of-the-art platform that provides a 360° visibility of the manufacturing floor in real time. Real-time visibility is helping the KEC team analyze run time, cycle time, availability and OEE of the machines in real time, allowing them to optimize the productivity output and minimize operational costs.

Empowering your Employees

Another key pillar for digital transformation is the ability to empower employees, providing tools and processes for greater collaboration, mobility, and insight. Microsoft works with a lot of its partners to offer solutions that help organizations achieve more by designing a workplace that’s intelligent, flexible, and secure. Some of these offerings are provided by partners like ZingHR, Vymo, Qustn, Knolskape, Symphony Summitt among others.

Optimizing business operations: Precimetrix

While customer engagement and employee empowerment are very visible pillars of digital transformation, the digital economy is having an equally transformative impact on how organizations approach operations. Precimetrix offers IoT & Analytics to enable real-time process management and actionable analytics to improve productivity, efficiency, and compliance. Samudra’s central monitoring system, powered by Precimetrix, provides a smart street lighting system for JPC which has reduced the maintenance cost by ~61.18 percent.

Transform your product: Teramatrix

The final pillar of digital transformation will help organizations differentiate and capture emerging opportunities by using data as a strategic asset and shifting from hindsight to foresight. Teramatrix offers an IoT software platform that enables companies to connect with their fixed or mobile infrastructure and analyze the massive data streams emanating from them. The deployment of their solution at Hero Moto Corp resulted in 20 percent expected increase in direct and indirect manpower productivity by enabling 24x7 continuity of testing operations and remote management of testing equipment.

Azure IoT Suite brings the Internet of things to life by connecting devices, analyze previously untapped data, and integrate business systems.

To get the most out of Industry 4.0 technologies, companies need to prepare for a digital transformation and data management and cyber security should be the main concern if they want to leverage the true power of industry 4.0.