Manufacturing technology challenges and trends

By Fernando da Silva, product manager, and Marco Osti, business analyst for manufacturing at Senior

 
The machines have always been connected to perform a certain action, even though automation is not something new for the manufacturing segment. And the evolution of the sector is not in more modern or more automated machines. The evolution of the sector is in an increasingly intelligent automation that dominates the process, generates data in real time and facilitates the understanding of production.
 
When the equipment notifies the manager about the right time for maintenance, all production wins. In this way, it is possible to monitor the entire action, making decision-making fast and assertive. There are still challenges for reducing costs, improving factory efficiency, increasing production, and, of course, profitability. For this, it is necessary to continue investing in tools and technologies that enable these gains. Staying competitive in the market is not an exclusive feature of the segment, but also of the entire market: you need to be efficient.
 
Just having a quality product is not enough: it is necessary that the cost allows interesting profit margins and competitive prices. Competition is very strong, so when efficiency is better, it is possible to invest in improvements. For what reasons do you think China remains very competitive, for example? It is not just a matter of taxation, but of the quality of the process and automation in the factories, that is, innovation aimed at a profitable process: producing more with better quality and low cost.
 
In addition to efficiency, another important factor in the process is digitization - which consists not only of digitizing important documents that the company needs to keep, but in all industrialization maps, sketches, and a series of extremely important information for management and monitoring of processes - since the entire manufacturing process is guided and controlled from documents. In addition, machine PLCs are also based on scanned documents and you need to know precisely which parts of them are communicated via equipment and system. There is no interaction with people releasing data in real time, everything is already programmed in advance.
 
Looking at the trends in this segment, which envision factories and smart cities inserted in a more “smart” world, as the market is demanding, it is important to keep in mind the development of these 4 technology pillars: M2M (machine-to-machine), cloud, network and big data.
 
M2M, which is machine-to-machine communication, is increasingly present within the factories. It works by means of temperature and pressure sensors, among others connected to each other, which generate a large volume of data. To safely store this information, the cloud (Cloud) enters as the great platform for this data.