Rockwell Automation COVID-19 Response is helping industries adopt digital measures to re-invent and grow

The outbreak of COVID-19 has exposed the digital preparedness of several businesses. Companies that were in the preliminary stages of adopting emerging technologies to streamline various business functions and operations are now looking closely at digital transformation to respond quickly to situations like COVID-19.

It is safe to say that many companies are responding to the pandemic with agility and innovating in different spheres, especially in the manufacturing sector, to cushion the impact of the virus.

For instance, distilleries that manufacture alcohol gels for hospitals have speed up their processes and manufacturers in automotive and aerospace have tweaked their operations and production facilities to manufacture ventilators and other basics required to tackle COVID-19.

Besides manufacturing units, even pharma industry has responded well to the situation and ramping up their own operations.

The swift and agile actions are a result of digital adoption and connected enterprise solutions. The capabilities afforded by these strategies have allowed executive decisions to filter into action in ways that would have been unimaginable during previous global crises.

Businesses that haven’t hoped the bandwagon yet can still overcome challenges with digital transformation. There are three main areas where tech can assist businesses to re-strategize and grow:

1. Business Continuity with safety measures

Businesses now have to change the definition and their policies of employee safety. They have to ensure social distancing to prevent their workforce from getting sick. For office-based employees, companies can still carry on with remote working, but about manufacturers, on-site operators and engineers? Here, remote technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) can provide a solution and explain machine operators with step-by-step instructions direct to smartphones and wearable devices such as smart glasses.

This also enables remote engineers to provide guidance to site-based operations staff even when they are not on-site – vital to ensuring social distance while maintaining operations and adapting production lines. It also allows technical specialists from essential equipment suppliers to remotely troubleshoot and support manufacturing operations.

2. Meeting demand with connected operations Indian companies can ramp up operations and supply chains to meet increasing demand for masks, ventilators, etc., which are a stronghold of China at present. With connected operations, IoT technologies and advanced analytics of digitised operations, businesses can forecast with precision how they can scale production to meet market demand and positions them for data-driven decision-making. It provides real-time insight into the functioning of their production lines, where they are losing productivity, what steps are creating bottlenecks, where preventative maintenance is required and any process improvements that can be made. To achieve this level of insight, manufacturers must have connected operations, enabling the large volumes of data produced by their connected assets to be contextualised. This allows tools such as analytics to deliver real value.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) is helping these businesses make the right decisions faster, as it thrives on complexity, crunching through multi-vector data at a speed impossible for humans. It is also being widely used in the drug discovery stage and has the capacity to dramatically reduce the time it will take to find a COVID-19 vaccine. Here, Rockwell Automation COVID-19 Response can help manufacturers in making right decisions.

3. Moving away from traditional products To tackle the current pandemic situation, many automobile manufacturers have started producing ventilators. But, this comes with many challenges such as altering production lines, learning to produce a completely new product.

Here, flexible manufacturing lines can help businesses to re-invent. Independent Cart Technology (ICT) has a high degree of flexibility already built into their production lines. These technologies enable businesses to rapidly adapt to changing demands and deliver increased throughput and much faster machine changeover times to produce new products at scale. A high degree of automation means that less on-site intervention is required than with traditional production lines, enabling plants to run effectively on a skeleton staff.

In a nutshell

We are living in unprecedented situation that call for extraordinary measures. Companies will have to adopt to digital technologies to scale in the post COVID-19 world.

This is partnered post.

First Published:May 18, 2020 11:29 AM IST