Accelerate Use of Industrial Automation

By admin April 10, 2012 9:26 am

The more you delay the more you are distanced from the industrial developments. Milind Kulkarni, Head-Business Development (factory automation) at Siemens highlights the dark spots and opportunities across automation industry in India
It is a famous saying that, “Invention of wheel is the biggest revolution for industry”. Yes off course, but in the context of automation industry, invention of logic circuits is the foundation of automation industry! This was laid may be 50 years back from now.
Since then the pace at which automation technology has been evolved is really stupendous. In India too manufacturing industry had a test of automation and beginning of era of automation (relevant to today’s context) quite a few decades back.
Today we are talking about ‘Automatic Launching of Satellite Vehicle’ and further projecting our own satellites in a successful manner! Indeed this is a big and revolutionary thing and topic of national pride for all of us. However, the question remains whether this degree of sophistication of automation has reached across all the industry segments adequately? The answer unfortunately is not ‘yes’ clearly.
I would like to segregate the automation implementation in two categories, first obviously is industrial domain but the other one which is being neglected is automation in household, in day to day life. In simple things like lighting and control for optimum energy utilisation, traffic signal controls, street light, park light control and may more like this. Degree of automation here is minuscule as compared to very size of our nation, barring metro cities and few ‘A’ class city, we seldom come across any efforts in automating such simple tasks for the holistic and important cause of energy saving!
In this article, we shall focus more on industrial automation.
Increase focus on SMEsMajority of manufacturing segments in Indian industry is witnessing plenty of investments since last decade. However, it won’t be wrong if we say that we are still in elementary stage of automation implementation particularly when we look at small and medium scale enterprise (SMEs) around.
There are some challenges which are required to be addressed fast to motivate one and all for going ahead with investments in automation.
One of the main challenges is mindset of people from SMEs. Despite the fact that they are convinced for the benefits of automation; they still think of doing this at latter stage. This is in fact delaying their ‘Time to Market’ although initial product costing appears on lower side; they face following issues due to absence or inadequacy in automation:• Lack of flexibility in the manufacturing set up• Lack of international quality of the product/s manufactured• Unable to meet the quantity demands due to lesser through put.

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