Heavy Engineering Equipment and Machine Tools Business

By OEM Update Editorial October 4, 2021 3:33 pm

Responds to emerging opportunities. 

Pandemic broke manufacturing and infrastructure opportunities for Heavy equipment and machinery industry and production environment. Heavy equipment and machinery engage heavy-duty vehicles mostly involving construction tasks and comprising five equipment systems: implementation, traction, structure, power train, control and information. 

The manufacturers of machine tools, mostly SMEs, supply machinery for the entire manufacturing sector. Heavy Engineering and machine tools sector consists of capital goods industry such as machine tools, textile machinery, construction, earthmoving, mining machinery and other heavy industrial machineries, MHE and Oil Field Equipment etc. These industries are de-licensed and foreign direct investment (FDI) up to 100 percent under automatic route as well as technology collaboration is allowed freely. 

For an interactive session conducted by OEM update on “Heavy Engineering Equipment and Machine Tools Business in India” the industry experts: V Sekar, Chief General Manager at BEML Limited, Saurabh Kulkarni, Mobile Automation Expert – Region India, B&R Automation, Kiran Kambhampati, Associate Principal, BMGI and Mukund Puranik, Senior Consultant, Universal Engineering Consultants participated in the panel discussion. Apart from enhancing learning, they answered the queries raised by delegates and the audience as the session moved on during the panel discussion. 

Emerging technologies be incorporated in design part 

Improving productivity and operating efficiency or the concern remains the focus. The rise in demand for automatic transmission in vehicles is being witnessed presently with predictive analysis. An increasing trend of autonomous vehicles is propelling growth of transmission control systems. More automation is the need and demand for the industry. 

Sekar said, yes, that relates to transmission technology and I want to just emphasise on that now, what we can say that the older people are migrating to hybrid configuration, when you say that there are mechanical tracks. So, for mechanical tracks, we are going with the automatic gearboxes, the simulators come for heavy trucks, because heavy trucks will mean more fatigue, so we are going with automatic transmissions for our kind of heavy duty construction equipment. The main key technology is called proportional control. So, earlier it is on-off control clutch modulation inside the transmission earlier it has been fixed with respect of one or two modulation volume that will cater for an entire range of the transfer for example, high speed; also things to kind of modulation, but that is not giving the adequate operator comfort even further driveline efficiency or I can say reliability because each and every operating condition is different. So, that was one kind of upgrade. 

But, now we are going more and more autonomous or it is machine learning and we are slowly migrating into hydrostatic whatever is coming there. So, we are going to readily eliminate the mechanical transmission; they’re going with the hydrostatic drive or the electric drive. So, you can see our entire mining field also. Now, there are things where the total is hybrid. The transmission is totally going to be the electric transmission from the alternator. In the future it will be very easy to convert into a battery truck and easy to convert into a trolley. So that is a migration that is going and that they have the technology coming now, it has been feasible. Now, it has already started migrating from mechanical transmission to electric transmission. 

Mobility applications and opportunities with technology innovations and IIoT advantages 

With the evolving automation, requirements for efficiency and quality are on the growing trajectory. Construction and commercial vehicles need a scalable automation system and connectivity. In respect of new possibilities in the mobile automation solutions for CNC robotic applications and implementing the same for the heavy equipment, Saurabh remarked, as with most parts of the world, India is also trying to respond to the challenges of this post Covid reality. So, it has also come to define a new normal for our economy as well as to the society at large. But, this pandemic has also taught us the mobilisation of human resources. So that’s why it is important to integrate automations in equipment or in these machines because we saw that there were no operators for these machines when the pandemic or the lockdown was there. So, it is necessary that more and more automation needs to be done. Plus, it also makes operation easier for the operator; plus, it also increases the downtime of the machine because then you have everything under the monitoring, including the fuel consumption, the number of hours the vehicle was running and the productivity of this vehicle. And there are a lot of things which can also be implemented along with. 

Further he added, the core automations which are like predictive maintenance or secure remote maintenance; you can put condition monitoring sensors onto the mechanical linkages. So, we know with the operation there’s always wear and tear. So, we know with the vibrations we can sense it and whether this is within the limit or beyond the limit. So, this can be predicted before the machine or the equipment breaks down and we can do the maintenance accordingly and talk with new technologies or innovations outside that robotics, CNC, IoT or the camera vision. These are the new trends or these are the must things now. So, they are always required and integrating robotics or CNC in this mobile equipment is not a big task. I would say we have already done it and what it helps us is in achieving a lot of efficiency from that equipment and also it reduces a lot of fatigue for operators like. I can give an example: we are working with Cisco from the US, wherein we have used this serial kinematics. So wherein you can define okay you need a trench you need to dig a trench of this dimensions and based on your bucket dimensions, the operator just needs to operate the level all the mechanical linkages and the hydraulic system it operates in such a way that he is able to dig that without pushing it further or without accelerating more or without giving more into hydraulic thing. 

So, these are the things which are changing, these are changing globally. And, I see India as the big market wherein we need to use or we need to adapt this to our requirement or we need to make this cost effective, but we need to work around it. But yes, I feel we are ready there and B&R Automation as a partner can also help many equipment machine manufacturers to implement such a technology. 

Strategy to enhance manufacturing heavy equipment enable paradigm shift 

Pandemic broke equipment manufacturing due to lockdown imposed on many sectors. According to Kiran what we’re seeing, I tell this from our firm’s experience, having worked with companies across sectors, in the last one and a half, two years, right from the pandemic. There is a lot of emphasis on you know, in the first wave hit, it was just to ensure that the operations are stable. And in terms of, you know, the labour workers were available or not, how do we schedule them! How do we ensure that things are shaped by the second wave happened; a lot more, you know, breakthroughs in terms of improvements that started happening by then, and companies were getting a little more confident in how to effectively tackle, you know, the post Covid scenario. I’ll just give you one or two examples here. Initially you asked about digitalisation, specifically, there was a lot of emphasis on ensuring that we get the right information or the data. So, there is a lot of data floating around now, how do we make sense out of it, how do we get insights out of it? So, a lot of companies suddenly started getting into analytics and started getting into the digitalisation of equipment. How do we ensure that you know, I mean, if there are 4 million bits of information, which is just coming, you know, and then companies started coming to us, asking for help saying how are we now; that we have installed automation solution we have installed equipment etc now, we need help to kind of make sense out of it. 

And, how do we ensure that the scheduling supply to demand, all of it is integrated, how do we analyse the data, the mountain of data that has come and then how do we come up with reasonable assumptions, and there is that amount of emphasis, kind of upscale in the workforce, and this is a industry and including, heavy engineering to say that, there was a lot of emphasis on how do we make the right decisions very quickly. So, even if it means lesser data, but, for quicker decisions, there was a lot of emphasis, right, and this is, I could give you examples across industries, which I already talked about a little and what we have seen, this is what companies are willing to adopt, you know, earlier manufacturing companies will not be very comfortable with. You know, statistical packages, etc. Now, they’re much more open. That’s what we’ve seen. And they want to kind of scale up very fast to ensure that they’re not left behind, compared to what was traditionally seen as a services industry where a lot of data analysis was done anyway, in banking, telecom and service industries and insurance, etc. 

But now, we have seen that in the last one and a half, two years, there’s a big jump, or shift towards embracing newer technologies, whether it is in automation, whether it is in technology, whether it is in digitalisation or whether it’s in skilling, in the people, and that’s been a big, let’s say benefit, unfortunately, I should not be saying benefit, but I get remembered of the job, which has been passed around what is the chief trigger for your digital strategy? And the answer is not the CEO or not the CTO, but COVID. So that’s kind of happened over the last one. 

Mukund, replying to a query raised by one of the delegates, stated that we never develop high tech machines like WFL and CNC systems, and so no necessity of R&D thought process was utilised to create facilities where the country can develop such products. Safety has always been at the backseat, now we are a little cautious for safety. 

He says, yes, we started differently in everything and we never had a strong R&D. In fact, in 1984 when Maruti Motors started they had a lot of requirements. The first global tender went to Japan. Second global Tender came from manufacturers in India. It was felt that when we are making machines, we are not given opportunities. So, we decided to directly deal with them. Maruti motors had a lot of controls, and automation was the main focus. Actually, we learned a lot of control from them. The controls received from Japan were of the standard actually. Thereafter we started a lot of controls in the machines, the CG controls and many other things. Now we are making similarly for other machines also, we have not developed any individual CNC system, which HMT also had taken basically in collaboration with Siemens. So that is where I want to say it clearly. So these are the areas where we must have different designs. HMT has its main R&D in Bangalore. Though, we could be ahead of the market, which we are not and we never considered or explored further. And yes, cost is one thing. Let’s say internal costs will be there, but that could have been compensated by a sort of machine. 

Present scenario and signs in manufacturing space Saurabh said, one is directly at the automotive company stage where we were interacting a lot with both the customer-facing, you know, marketing and sales function, and also the R&D function. So, the query is more towards the component side. Now, interestingly, we had a lot of interest where, you know, something like, how do we design better, so if we were to, do a complete breakdown of all the components and do Value Engineering, and, you know, how we ensure that. 

You know, the ballooning industry of electric two wheeler segment, I would specifically call out that, because we have worked with one client, about a year back during the pandemic, you know, a two wheeler client, who was looking at innovating and coming up with a new product, and how did it work backwards and impact into the R&D, which in turn, would then affect their suppliers and the OEM because their requirements would then be, looked at that. Giving you an example, a full page advt., of the Mahindra new vehicle, which has been launched, and you know, two thirds or half the page was covered with all the equipment manufacturers, and thanking them for coming up, you know, helping Mahindra to kind of come up with this product. And that’s the emphasis, which is ensuring that we, you know, the OEMs, the end user or the industry, who we are catering to is giving that much more importance to R&D and the different methodologies, you know, whether it’s designed for six sigma, which is a traditional approach for six sigma. We’re also talking about design for six sigma, where it involves the components and then getting into the machine tools and how do we ensure that we build the machine tools to make those components. 

Sekar remarked, `The current standard of our automotive standard is a BS VI. We are really facing challenges. We are not getting the indigenous manufacturer in this particular system. So, even though we are engine manufacturers, we are working with some of the Indian companies also. The majority of the people are depending on China, that is one of the measures, it’s cost effective. From this October onwards we’re supposed to get all the construction equipment from Serbia, which is stage four. In fact Indian industry has to start to develop the indigenous expertise. 

Final note 

I think this topic is very important, states Mukund. Considering everybody’s presentations accurately, it was very interesting to learn more, and was a good addition to the knowledge in every field. For heavy equipment also, checks are a really good thing actually. Kiran says, it’s been a great pleasure to interact with all of you, panelists, and also the attendees and looking forward to many such intellectually stimulating discussions, and of course, followed up with the action where, you know, it’s really implemented. And as Saurabh observes: as with most parts of the world, India is also trying to respond to the challenges of ongoing post Covid reality. Obviously, we have seen that in the last one and a half to two years, there’s a shift towards embracing newer technologies, whether it is in automation, whether it is technology, whether it is in digitalisation or whether it’s in skilling people and we are on path to recovery and progress emboldening the move to enhance business activities.