1. 24 EM | Jul 2016
round-table | management
Megha Roy
Senior Features Writer
megha.roy@publish-industry.net
Advancing your journey as a
digital manufacturer
According to recent reports, manufacturing generates more
data than any other sector of the economy. However, most
manufacturing organisations struggle with where to begin
the digital journey, and what business leaders do with their
digital advantage. The round-table features how and why
manufacturers should walk through the digital journey
so as to achieve productive excellence.
Manufacturing has had an extensive account of
transformation. From the early days of steam-powered
machines to high-volume assembly lines to automation and
computer systems, technology has played a fundamental
role in driving advancement. This transformation has
impacted the way products are considered, assembled and
consumed. Indeed, the effect has been so prevalent that it
has re-deployed the global manufacturing dynamics.
Today, it is alleged that digital manufacturing
technologies will renovate every single association in the
manufacturing value chain, from R&D, supply chain, and
factory operations to marketing, sales and service. Digital
connectivity among designers, managers, workers,
consumers, and physical industrial assets will be unlocking
enormous value and changing the manufacturing landscape
forever. Sharing insights on how a digital transformation
Maria Jerin
Features Writer
maria.jerin@publish-industry.net

2. 25EM | Jul 2016
management | round-table
can escalate business models are Kalyan Sridhar, Vice
President & Country Manager, PTC India; Gautam Dutta,
Senior Director—Marketing, Siemens PLM Software India;
Dr Pradeep Chatterjee, Senior General Manager & Global
Solution Architect, Cummins Inc and Siddhalingprabhu
Amane, Managing Consultant.
How will digitalisation disrupt manufacturing
industry?
Digital disruption is already happening across
manufacturing and other industrial sectors. So, how does an
organisation harness the benefits of digitisation across their
value chains? Answering this, Sridhar opines that a digital
world will enable to develop global standards that are
flexible to accommodate regional, customer or product
requirements. “Becoming a digital enterprise ensures the
productiveness of associates is not only fully utilised, but
also that their knowledge is spread across the enterprise.
This will be central to manufacturing strategy and will be
the lynch pin for all major initiatives, as the success of this
adoption will be directly measured by the impact on the
bottomline,” he shares.
Dutta believes that the innovation process boils down to
three fundamental phases—ideation, realisation and
utilisation. “Manufacturers are better equipped to initiate or
respond to complexities of disruptive innovation when their
process is fully digitalised – from ideation through
realisation to utilisation. Digitalisation transforms the
innovation process into a proactive agent in driving new
business opportunities,” he says.
As per Dr Chatterjee, the impact of digitalisation in
manufacturing in the next five to ten years is likely
to be focussed around automation, advanced robotics,
artificial intelligence-based advanced analytics, Additive
Manufacturing and human – machine interface technologies.
Furthermore, he says, “Development of advanced robotics
will impact operations in manufacturing, bringing in greater
accuracy, better quality and higher productivity. Market-
centric digital solutions will help in better predicting
markets and customers.”
Digital technologies are also helping with flexibility,
mass & customised production and are identified as
disruptors in the manufacturing industry. Justifying this,
Amane explains, “Visibility (technology) alone couldn’t
execute faster decision-making, but augmenting it with
newer technologies like real-time data analytics and artificial
intelligence can help automation of decision-making and
disrupt the industry.”
Moving ahead, such a digital era definitely calls for
variations in infrastructure, cyber security and partnerships.
Speaking on the changes, Dr Chatterjee states, “Though
cloud computing environments are getting prominence,
with IIoT, it is likely to change to localised computing and
storage, storing only important and historical data on cloud
for analysis. Also, cyber security will play a big role and
“For supply chain, services &
production operations, business
models can be changed by
real-time data of products”
Kalyan Sridhar,
Vice President & Country Manager,
PTC India
“Digitalisation transforms
the innovation process in
driving new business
opportunities”
Gautam Dutta,
Senior Director—Marketing,
Siemens PLM Software India

3. 26 EM | Jul 2016
round-table | management
robust security standards & protocols are likely to
develop further to secure solutions. Dutta believes the same
and further opines that these transformations will drive
changes in the manufacturing ecology – from logistics,
supply chain, transportation, energy, environment, skills,
manufacturing to R&D.
Digital transformation: a major opportunity
Digitalisation makes the digital thread of knowledge a
proactive agent in driving a business model. Emplacing this,
Dutta believes that with a fully optimised digital enterprise,
one is better equipped to initiate or respond to disruptive
innovation. Also, with digital transformation, manufacturers
can seize the opportunity to re-design business models and
processes from R&D and engineering through supply chain,
services and production operations. Sridhar points out these
opportunities as better product insights, high customer
experience and new ways of delivering customer service.
“Connecting the factory and delivering smart products
may, however, require re-thinking of the business model.
For supply chain, services and production operations,
business models can be changed by real-time data of
products. This impacts the product maintenance costs
and customer experience and allows manufacturers to use
this information for designing new products. Modelling a
business on Augmented Reality technology also works,”
he observes.
Vouching on predictive capabilities for a transformation,
Dr Chatterjee suggests, “Predicting failures in operations &
products at customers end, will help manufacturing
organisations to plan better to minimise or address such
failures in a better way. It will help to improve quality and
productivity. Digital solutions will touch each activity in the
complete value chain creation process of manufacturing.”
To re-design business models, Dutta urges manufacturers
to adopt a framework engaging people by personalising
user experience, where people can ask questions of their
models and get insightful answers to make decisions faster
and less expensively than in the physical world, where they
can virtually try out process and be sure it can move directly
into the production to make engineering faster and
utilise capital equipment more efficiently, and lastly, a
framework, which helps build a system that provides
on going return on investment by embedding the best
practices from successful implementations, making future
implementations much easier.
When manufacturing value drivers are examined
and mapped to digital levers, several opportunities for
companies to create value by improving operational
effectiveness and product innovation are found. As per
Amane, product as a service, remains an important aspect
of emerging business models and needs distinctive
capabilities, in turn, making it a core competence. “It also
changes the dimensions of the business case drastically
along with the risk parameterisation,” he says.
“Organisations need to adopt
digital-first approach for its
products, operations and
support”
Dr Pradeep Chatterjee,
Senior General Manager & Global
Solution Architect,
Cummins Inc
“Flexible integration of
capabilities into complete
value chain results in re-
designing business models”
Siddhalingprabhu Amane,
Managing Consultant

4. 28 EM | Jul 2016
round-table | management
business. “Traditional measures of success – quality,
cost, speed aren’t enough. It does not matter what size is a
manufacturer. Digitalisation helps them create a
model-driven enterprise. It helps them model their existing
business and future alternatives,” he asserts.
To achieve this goal, the first step is to understand the
capabilities of digital solutions. “Organisations need to
adopt digital-first approach for all new requirements, such
as setting up new plants, production line, etc. Skills,
which will be mandatory, are domain expertise, automation,
IT, artificial intelligence, cyber security, sensor technology,
electrical, electronics, communications technologies,
analytics & big data management. It will not be limited
to these and some more new skill set requirements are likely
to emerge,” says Dr Chatterjee.
Conversely Amane believes, that complexity and
lack of digital capabilities are not holding many firms back.
Rather, he says, “It’s the lack of ability to structure and
re-structure the complexity of business that is holding
firms back to undertake transformation. Secondly, it is the
conventional parameter of business case formulation and
lack of intent to incorporate the newer intangible
parameters like flexibility/agility due to inability to assign
monetary value to these, which is holding the firms back.
To address this, the management capabilities need to
strongly tilt towards design of systems from executing
through the system.”
Driving a solution
Manufacturers can, nowadays, virtually model any
design, production and distribution process to improve
agility or optimise performance to achieve operational
Walking through digital transformation…
Dutta opines that the key drivers for manufacturing
organisations towards digital transformation include crowd
sourcing, IoT and Big Data analytics. “Meanwhile, these
same forces, along with Additive Manufacturing and
advanced robotics are also changing how manufacturers
produce smart products,” he adds. In this context,
Amane adds, “Flexible integration of capabilities into
complete value chain result in not only re-designing, but
re-defining the business models. Digital transformation
should be broken into two areas – enterprise capabilities &
business model and IT capabilities.”
Complexity and lack of digital capabilities are holding
many firms back. Speaking on a roadmap to achieve
this transformation, Sridhar focuses on IoT and Augmented
Reality. While he says that the next generation of IoT
should go well beyond real-time, monitoring to connected
information platforms that leverage data and advanced
analytics to deliver higher-quality, more durable, and
more reliable products; for augmented reality, industrial
manufacturing companies are using it to provide hands-free
training, enable faster responses to maintenance requests,
track inventory, increase safety and provide a real-time view
of manufacturing operations.
Adding on the impact of IoT advancements here, Dutta
affirms that IoT as a transformation force, is estimated to
have impacted more than 300% increase in connected
devices over the past 5 years and is estimated to have
economic impact of US$ 36 trillion of operating costs of key
affected industries by 2025. In a world of smart, connected
products, where entire markets can vanish with a single
innovation, manufacturers must take a new approach to

5. 29EM | Jul 2016
management | round-table
excellence. The combined effect of these two megatrends
is now creating unprecedented new challenges – and
opportunities – for manufacturers, suppliers, investors and
consumers. Speaking more on challenges, Sridhar says,
“Lack of visibility into product data diminishes any potential
for reuse and may introduce additional errors because
of inaccurate data and time-consuming tasks. Inefficient,
inconsistent product development processes and incomplete
product definitions can drive up your costs and lead
to product delays.” According to Amane, planning for
transient phase of transformation execution and business
continuity, by large, remains the key challenge in this
industry.
Suggesting solutions for the same, Dr Chatterjee regards,
“Organisations need to adopt digital-first approach for its
products, operations & support.” He further suggests, “Cyber
security threats will always exist and have to keep getting
addressed. Better security measures are being developed to
safeguard, which is a continuous journey and, hence, are
less likely to cause disruptions to manufacturing activities.”
Dutta re-affirms that to optmise production, a
manufacturing framework with intelligent models that
self-optimises efficient product realisation and successful
customer utilisation is vital. He explains the four pillars of
such a system with a combination of engaged users;
intelligent models; realised products and an adaptive system
for delivering an architecture that’s quickly deployable,
easily upgradeable and highly flexible.
It’s clear that digital transformation in manufacturing
is underway now and is continuing to gain momentum.
Manufacturers should not only consider their own
positions on the journey, but also how they stand, compared
to their competitors. As per Sridhar, with a consolidated,
integrated product development infrastructure, the total
cost of ownership is minimised and processes are
standardised. “So, a complete digital product definition
enables more effective digital prototyping, testing and other
downstream activities,” he concludes. ☐