Democratisation of automation to be future trend

By OEM Update Editorial January 2, 2021 10:48 am IST

I foresee Inovance to be one of the biggest vendors of industrial automation equipment in the Indian market.

Anil Kumar, Director of Inovance Technology India

In an interview with OEM Update magazine, Anil Kumar, Director of Inovance Technology India discussed the future of Indian market in automation, and how there solutions will help the increase in the reach.

Government aims to increase the share of the manufacturing sector to country’s GDP to 25 percent by 2025. What will be your sectors contribution in the same? 

It is almost impossible for me to make an estimation of the automation sector’s contribution to this in financial terms. But what I would say is that, if the government wants to increase the size of the Indian manufacturing sector, then automation is absolutely crucial to this goal. Because without automation, then manufacturing in India will simply not be internationally competitive. And if India wants to have 25 percent of the country’s GDP coming from manufacturing, then such a large manufacturing sector would clearly have to be export dependent – so international competitiveness would be crucial.

And while high levels of automation may sound concerning from the point of view of jobs, in fact it should not be. After all, look at Germany and Japan – these countries have some of the highest numbers of industrial robots per manufacturing worker, and yet they also have some of the highest numbers of manufacturing workers per head of population in the world. In fact, I believe that in Germany manufacturing is about 20% of the economy – so not far off the target the government has set for us here in India.

With increased reliance on digitisation, which automation technologies have emerged enormously in driving your sector’s growth?

Well, we are primarily a vendor of industrial automation hardware such as variable speed drives, motion control products, PLCs, HMIs, CNCs and industrial robots. Some of these technologies have been around a while – such as variable speed drives which I believe were first commercialised in the 1970s – but of course they are always evolving.

And as you say, it is really digitisation that is changing everything these days. Increasingly, cloud computing is giving manufacturers access to analytical capabilities that would have been unimaginable a few short years ago. It’s an emerging trend – and many worry about cybersecurity. But the potential for efficiency improvements is vast. Essentially, cloud computing means that one can theoretically record all the data coming off a machine, store it, analyse it, and work out how to make efficiency improvements. I am not saying we can do this today, but it is coming.

Automated technologies are widely adopted by almost every industry, including MSMEs and do you see democratisation of automation as a reality in the near future?

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