Manufacturing is one of the most significant contributors to Asia-Pacific’s economy and is undergoing a rapid transformation. Mordor Intelligence forecasts that the Asia Pacific Smart Manufacturing Market is expected to register a CAGR of 7.57% over the forecast period from 2021 to 2026.

Industry 4.0 is the latest revolution in the manufacturing landscape fuelled by the integration of production machines, wireless connectivity, and sensors – all linked to a system platform ecosystem that oversees the whole production line process and executes decisions autonomously.

Smart manufacturing promises to transform businesses and achieve significant value by leveraging the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), cloud, and analytics solutions.

Simith Nambiar

According to Simith Nambiar, practice lead, emerging tech APJ at Rackspace Technology, manufacturers in the region are asking how they can drive operational efficiencies within the factory by getting better insights from the data produced by the various machines, predicting machine failure, improving the quality of the products, reduce defects.

Nambiar claims that 95% of the data produced on the manufacturing floor today is unusable.

“There is a lot of value in unlocking this data from the factory floor as it provides the manufacturer with real-time actionable insights to reduce downtime, improve quality across the manufacturing line. Strong leadership and a clear vision are key to any digital transformation journey,” he continued.

How can organisations use connected products to build new revenue streams and enhance customer experience through real-time, cloud-powered intelligence?

Simith Nambiar: Device manufacturers are increasingly connecting their products, not only to provide value-added services to the customers but also to create new revenue streams and business models. Connecting a device to the internet requires experience. Device manufacturers have a skill shortage when it comes to cloud-native development as well as the security of the device.

You mentioned the proliferation of data and protocols on the production floor. As companies look to introduce IoT on the floor, how does data from IIoT empower manufacturers to gain insights from their fleet of distributed devices to enhance operations?

Simith Nambiar: For customers in both manufacturing and mining, where industrial IoT is widely being adopted, downtime within their factories of plants can lead to millions of dollars lost every year.

The issues customers want to tackle are to prevent failures, breakdowns, downtime, minimise risks. The first step in the journey towards a smarter factory or plant starts with the collection of data from factory floor equipment and the generation of key metrics which can lead to actionable insights.

This is known as the Data Liberation phase. The next phase is to look at data for advanced use cases like predictive maintenance and anomaly detection using machine learning.

How does the adoption of IIoT help Singapore achieve its Manufacturing 2030 strategy of growing Singapore's manufacturing sector by 50% of its current value?

Simith Nambiar: Singapore needs to develop its competitiveness through its ability to innovate quickly produce higher-value products by not lowering the costs of production or labour. Singapore will also need to ramp up its efforts to create better job opportunities locally and to create a highly-skilled workforce that can be used for advanced manufacturing use cases.

It can be done through the adoption of industrial IoT and cloud to automate, predict and innovate effectively to truly achieve industry 4.0.

Click on the PodChat player to listen to Nambiar’s take on how manufacturers can realise the promise of smart manufacturing with IoT.

1. What are some digital transformation challenges faced by manufacturers in 2022?
2. How can organisations use connected products to build new revenue streams and enhance customer experience through real-time, cloud-powered intelligence?
3. You mentioned the proliferation of data and protocols on the production floor. As companies look to introduce IoT on the floor, how does data from IIoT empower manufacturers to gain insights from their fleet of distributed devices to enhance operations?
4. How does the adoption of IIoT help Singapore achieve its Manufacturing 2030 strategy of growing Singapore's manufacturing sector by 50% of its current value?

Allan Tan

Passionate about IoT!