Information and communication technologies
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Description
Among the major challenges that manufacturing companies face today are the growing complexity of their processes and supply networks, cost pressures, growing user and customer expectations for quality, speed, and custom products, and worker safety and assistance. Manufacturing is evolving from being perceived as a production-centred operation to a human-centred business with a greater emphasis on workers, suppliers and customers being in-the-loop.
The foremost requirement for addressing these challenges is collaboration. In collaborative manufacturing, ICT will support a constant feedback loop without media breaks between product designers, engineers, state-of-the-art production facilities and customers. In collaborative supply networks, OEMs will be able to offer value-added services (e.g. maintenance, upgrade) or even sell their “products as a service”. Remote service management helps to improve equipment uptime, reduce costs for servicing (e.g. travel costs), increase service efficiency (e.g. first-visit-fix-rates) and accelerate innovation processes (e.g. remote update of device software). Through customer collaboration future ICT solutions would enable extraction of customer and after-sales information from sources such as the social networks and feed this information to develop personalized and customized end products of the future.
Connectivity is inherent to the development of the future workplace. Manufacturing processes should seamlessly and bi-directionally interact with real-world objects and environments on a global scale, across a variety of application domains and stakeholders thus realising the ‘Internet of Thing’s. Workers’ direct interaction with physical systems will enable processes that are real-world aware, event-based, and significantly more adaptive than today’s processes, which will result in increased visibility, responsiveness, and safety in the workplace of the future. Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) have to be opened up and made highly reliable to facilitate globalcollaboration across multiple organisations similar to the services offered on today’s Internet. Globally accepted standards, methods, and tools have to be developed to enable large scale infrastructures that can be configured, integrated, and monitored efficiently. Intelligent systems with advanced self-configuration, self-monitoring, and self-healing properties are required to manage the large and fast growing number of devices. One of the biggest challenges for connectivity is that of security. Different stakeholders with varying business interests and hierarchy will access the product, production, and customer data outside enterprise boundaries to accomplish various manufacturing operations.
Mobility will play a pivotal role in the workplace of the future by arming both workers and supervisors with critical data at their fingertips. ICT needs to focus on infrastructure mechanisms beyond pure connectivity that support manufacturing business needs (e.g., flexible manufacturing cloud services for storage and computation, robust and efficient security and payment mechanisms as well as means of dedicated information gathering and process analytics). Furthermore, next-generation of mobility assisted manufacturing applications such as manufacturing & logistics traceability, product genealogy, cross-channel product distribution, and “manufacturing app stores” should be developed.
Lastly, ICT research in manufacturing intelligence will assimilate the huge amount of data originating as a result of increased collaboration and connectivity and render meaningful information on-the-fly on mobile devices for managers and shop floor supervisors. Progress beyond the state-of-the art in complex event processing, real-time data analysis, and forecasting of complex scenarios originating in workplaces of the future need to be made. Research, development and innovation (R&D&I) in this area aims at providing full transparency across all stages of the manufacturing process. This transparency is required to optimize operational efficiency, and guarantee seamless tracking, tracing, and compliance. Currently, most business intelligence systems only allow the user to analyze this data in reporting mode; however, with in-memory technology future manufacturing enterprises will be able to analyze and “play with” data in real time.
All solutions of the future should inherently be more sustainable by offering ways to reduce energy consumption, increase sustainability, and reuse through the use of reconfigurable modules. A lot of attention is dedicated to the development of technologies that help maximise the impact on SMEs with the goals of giving them access to affordable and high-yield modern production technologies, and industrializing them rapidly to deliver innovative products at competitive price advantage.