Manufacturing in India is driving the growth story and with Atma Nirbhar Bharat theme it has picked up more momentum. India is spearheading Digital transformation projects across the globe, in this article I am trying to cover different aspects of the Digital Transformation (DT) in manufacturing and what matters most!

DT is a well thought journey , starting with Digitisation, moving to Digitalisation and as DT as final destination. It is right mix of people process and technology (PPT), often referred as golden triangle

The picture with PPT interfacing captures how one can use People Process Technology combination to drive innovation, automation or scaling up.

We all know benefit of Digitalisation, it helps doing more with less and in a better way, it drives organisation towards data-driven decisions and insights.

Now let's look at what are areas where DT is important to have in manufacturing,

• Operations visibility: IOT / smart manufacturing are no more buzz words. Connected shop floor and production lines gives visibility on machines performance, operating efficiency, opportunity loss, unplanned downtime, shift / supervisor wise performance and many more such insights. IoT sensors driven predictive maintenance, environmental condition monitoring are also mature use cases.
• Digitization of log books, collection of utility reading or automation in certain cases using flow meters
• For manufacturing, batches traceability is important, for this barcode integrated dispatches helps ensuring that physically dispatched vs invoiced batches are same. There are quite a few players and solutions around this.
• The other standard use cases for manufacturing include MRP, Recipes and BoM management, actual costing, asset management, plant maintenance , gate passes etc to new few which are more of ERP centric
• New technology fronts, 3D printing, AR, VR, 3D Glasses are having mature use cases towards progress monitoring, simulation, and agile operations These technologies help in remote trouble shooting, guided installation through remote help.
• Security gate operations at manufacturing sites offer larger scope towards digitization of operations be it visitor gate pass, vehicle management, in-out of materials, intelligent CCTV operations to name few.
• Supply chain is another critical use case in case of manufacturing - SCM cost are major cost in many cases depending geography being serviced, digitisation in SCM helps optimizing routes, network, real time visibility of vehicle fleet and help effective inventory management at various stocking points.

The above list is just a high level and will vary depending on industry, size, and overall objective.

The opportunities are unlimited - I strongly believe that the journey starts from top level, functional leaders must own digitalisation KPI to make difference.

This is a journey, and one needs to start somewhere and start scaling up and continue finding new ways of working, digitization and getting to data-driven culture.