As manufacturers accept the fact that they must undergo a “digital transformation” if they want to stay in business for the long term, many are moving toward technology—like the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). But adopting technology just for technology sake doesn’t solve anything. You can’t slap a sensor onto an instrument and expect results.
The digital journey must be engineered. Enter L&T Technology Services (LTTS), an engineering services organization that has developed a portfolio of proprietary technologies designed to help clients accelerate implementations and realize the benefits of Industry 4.0.
Bundled under the moniker of Factory D.0, the company introduced its offerings during a press conference this week at ARC Industry Forum in Orlando, Florida. The point of the technology portfolio is to solve the major challenges manufacturers face by identifying the right use cases that will benefit the most from digitalization and deliver a return on investment.
“Factory D.0 is a set of solutions we’ve developed in collaboration with smart manufacturing,” says Narayanan Ramanathan, global head of digital engineering at L&T Technology Services. “Our customers are all doing digitalization in some form, but they haven’t figured out the right use case. It’s not aligned with their business goals.”
In an effort to solve that problem, Factory D.0 is a one-stop shop offering wireless material tracking, machine vision-based quality inspection, digital twin, energy optimization, collaborative robotics, integrated 3D modeling and virtual reality, and more. Working with manufacturers across a variety of industry sectors over the last year, LTTS have gone into organizations to do a benchmark analysis, understand each company’s digital maturity, conduct a gap analysis to understand the obstacles and areas of opportunity, and then build proof of concepts for particular application areas.
Some of the early results include: A wireless material tracking system at a global aerospace manufacturer that implemented RFID tags across the supply chain to track orders, market data and production schedules as part of an integrated database. In the first year, one production line had an annual savings of over $100,000 while productivity went up 30 percent and parts availability increased by 40 percent.
Separately, LTTS designed a quality inspection system for an organization that automated manual processes. The system resulted in an annual savings of $150,000 on one production line, an 8 percent productivity increase and lowering rejection rates by 20 percent. And, they did a digital twin of the factory floor at a confectionery plant that simulated parts from real-time data, providing the company with the ability to do “what if” scenarios to figure out inefficiencies in the plant. In the first year, the manufacturer had a savings of over $1 million with overall equipment effectiveness up by 13 percent.
LTTS covers a breadth of services as it continues to work closely with major manufacturers to unearth new digitalization use cases that unlock business value.
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