The Manufacturing World, the economic heart of many countries worldwide, is currently undergoing a data-heavy revolution that indicates the definite requirement for transforming legacy manufacturing plants into data-driven, highly-optimised smart facilities. Smart Factories of the modern age keep improving and optimising in generating manufacturing intelligence through capitalising on Big Data every passing minute. Technologies like Embedded Analytics, IoT Systems, CPS or Cyber-Physical systems are now harnessed for the purpose of exploiting Big Data to cultivate revelations in order to improve the manufacturing endeavours of the manufacturing industry. With tremendous technological opportunities marking the industrial countries with emerging economies, digital transformations, significant technological advancements and Big Data, it is pivotal that you are familiar with how Big Data can serve in elevating the Manufacturing World. Why is data, or nevertheless, Big Data, crucial in the Manufacturing World? What are the advantages that the global manufacturing giants partake in by using Big Data? Join us today to read a five-minute piece of intelligence to comprehensively understand the role of Big Data in the Manufacturing Industry of the new age.
Current Manufacturing trends
Recently, the manufacturing world has been relying on newer manufacturing methodologies like lean manufacturing and other modern manufacturing strategies that root easier manufacturing initiatives like automated factories, responsive prefabrication for smart factories, interconnected industrial equipment networks and many more. With these new disruptions, the need for data-centric upgrades in Manufacturing IT infrastructures is mandatory. These demands replaced inefficient looping production runs into real-time data that shrouds all hidden manufacturing performances, KPIs, discrepancies; allowing manufacturing investors and custodians an end-to-end manufacturing profile of their overall shop-floor activities- even the most minute operations.
With the maturation of this data; the advent of Big Data was not a surprise. The term, Big Data, is now a collective, catchall term that ideates the massive datasets that are being pooled by organisations, equipment and a diversity of other data sources. Big Data is voluminous and cannot be tackled by retro-fitting IT solutions, but with better Data Managing Tools and solutions, Big Data can be capitalised on to making beneficial manufacturing decisions.
What really is Big Data in a Manufacturing Context?
In a Manufacturing context, Big Data is everywhere! It can be introduced as a term for data collected during each and every stage of the production processes- extracted from devices, operators and machines. It can be stored up to a sheer volume of structures and unstructured data sets, leading to the emergence of hi-tech IT solutions-MES, manufacturing analytics software, CMMS, ERP-, data manoeuvring tools and practices that can tackle convoluted sets of data for better manufacturing decisions. To enable proper Big Data Analytics in the Manufacturing sector a colossal amount of hardware and IT infrastructure is used to support the utilisation of modern technologies like ML (Machine Learning) and deep learning models and algorithms empowered by AI. The more hi-tech and updated the manufacturing systems get, the more amount of real-time streaming data is aggregated which is why manufacturing companies must adopt technological solutions to ingest, standardise, and enrich Big Data to glean shrewd data insights.
To put this in a less jargony manner; Manufacturing entrepreneurs have to invest in modern technological processors and digital repositories to save the huge amounts of data generated by Smart Factories. Manufacturing data are therefore saved in Data Lakes or Cloud platforms for better storage purposes. Manufacturing companies can then harness the stored data into actionable data analytics to enhance manufacturing organisations’ quality, productivity and efficiency. Big Data elevates manufacturing operations and processes by providing detailed data that is vivid down to an extremely granular level.
Big data can be capitalised by Manufacturing custodians to:
- Improve the manufacturing processes of the factories with increased yields
- Manage the end-to-end supply chains
- Ensure the assurance of product qualities
- Plan and customise product designs to meet specific market demands
- Evaluate and track down any potential risks and more.
- Initiate predictions that can increase yield and cut down costs
- Allow budget forecasting strategies for asset investors
The importance of Big Data for Manufacturing Companies
There are many importances and benefits spurred by Big Data that mitigates the operational and administrative executions in the Manufacturing World. Big Data allows plant managers to decode complex, convoluted manufacturing processes in terms of their specific insight types, such as based on dependency, priority, complexity and interlinkages of the manufacturing processes. They use data visualisation platforms, significance testing, artificial neural networks and correlation analytical tools for this purpose. Evidently, compared to other industries, the manufacturing industry has more need to do well out of Big Data capturing, so it is important to understand better how Big Data can benefit your manufacturing firm. Explained below are a few instances where the importance of leveraging Big Data in the manufacturing field is most vividly expressed.
- Smart Technological Integrations
The most advanced and well-known advantage of Big Data is that it is one of the main drives towards digital transformation in the manufacturing field. It does not empower processes individually but rather combines information systems for better relevance and real-time data retrievals. By combining such data sources, Big Data enables manufacturing personnel to collect, ingest and feed a mausoleum of data sets to data-hungry AI, ML and deep learning models that will instigate digital transformations in factories. Building such efficient ‘Data Pipelines’ is the key to ensuring that your Smart Factories are future proof and updated at all times. - Tracking Products and more!
Most manufacturing companies immediately believe that the sole purpose of Big Data is to track and maintain the manufacturing processes. It is an important capability that Big Data enables, but another equally important fact is that it renders great strength in optimising operations in a factory! Most companies use vast troves of Big Data to note where their assets are and how they are being utilised but with further analysis, these data can spot means of better operations by drawing actionable operational insights. With the emergence of IoT, a new emergence for operational capability enriching was opened up; it potentially supercharged the space that manufacturers have for manipulating data to streamline their shop-floor activities. - Industrial Casualties can be pinpointed beforehand
Even the most minute of deviations in industrial networks can be detected when the real-time big data streams are effectively pondered into Smart IT solutions. This enables the plant managers to react instantly to real-time anomaly detections. With better-trained models, these detections can be targeted and extricated with high statistical significance and scientifically backed reasons. It would answer questions like on what scenarios does the factory face higher idle time and downtimes? Or which production line has lesser productivity rates and why? It will increase production yields and avoid casualties by ensuring the in-house process accuracies. - Competitive Advantages
Big Data Analytical capabilities powered by AI technologies allows companies to compare and contrast the cost data and pricing tactics of their own and others. This allows the cost allocations to be apportioned in the most budget-friendly manners and attract target clients with considerate pricing schemes. Guessing optimised price variants especially when determining the price for made-to-order products, can be effortlessly communicated while winning the heart of the client’s giving the company a headstart in the competition.With Big Data, the manufacturers can study the most influential tactics that can attract the client to their proprietary products more than to their rivals’ merchandise.Data scientists also use neural-network techniques to detect the relative impacts during different scenarios and compare these production inputs’ parameters against their yields. By doing such research and developments, companies can find more apt manufacturing cultures and practices to boost the demands and customer gratifying rates easily.
- Asset Life-Cycle Optimisation
Another important factor where Big Data cannot be missed is in ensuring the efficiency of industrial equipment and machinery. Surprisingly, when matured data is effectively fed into Predictive Maintenance Systems (which are highly advantageous than scheduled maintenance protocols), manufacturing firms can detect actual performance and concurrent conditions of corporate assets. This allows the manufacturing managers to anticipate when certain equipment will fail and what measures must be taken to avoid extended system downtimes and other discrepancies.Big Data allows the elimination of root causes, which will slow down and flaw the manufacturing processes with utmost certainty.Modern Factories nowadays are already investing in industrial robots (which is much to the dismay of other traditional factories). Such equipment integration via IIoT technology also adds up to the aggregation of Industrial Big Data with automated and highly efficient factory operations. Big Data allows all these components to remain up and running through predictive technologies that keep track of the remaining lifetimes and actual performances of industrial assets.
- Supply Chain Management
The Supply Chain Activities can also be managed based on the historical information of the suppliers. Manufacturing firms can ensure whether the supplier is competent and reliable in providing deliveries as agreed and reduce risks that avoid streamlining and optimising supply chains. Some of the benefits of Big Data Analysis in this aspect are:- Proper planning of procurement activities
- Smart Supply Network provisioning
- Comparing Supplier
- Profiles to shake the hand of the most competent partners
- Confident execution of Supply Chain activities and more.
- Product Quality Assuring Technologies
One of the most crucial importance of Big Data is that it allows the manufacturing companies to keep track of the Product Life Cycles of the items in the manufacturing plant. Big Data allows the plant managers to analyse previous product data against the critical market factors to determine the most suitable value, ingredients, packaging that their products should have. With Big Data analysis, the IT solutions can use Business Intelligence ML models to anticipate market demands based on the data generated through operations, productions, ordering and more for pre-determined order delivering.It also allows the manufacturing firms to unravel concealed patterns that can enable the manufacturing custodians to pursue undisrupted improvement in throughputs and yields. - Workstation Optimisation
With enough data extracted from work orders, employee skills, workstation statuses and factory amenities, structuring work cells to meet efficiency targets is made easier too! All the data of CPS can be analysed to gather insights on optimal human-environmental interactions and how it can be achieved through federating manufacturing systems to streamline operations. - Increased Yield
Big Data can be capitalised by innovative manufacturing specialists with the intention of reducing costs to proliferate corporate yields. Optimal Big data Analysis can scaffold the manufacturing companies to drive towards improved production throughputs via well-trialled production networks- systematically installed work cells, better employee work allocations and improved manufacturing protocols. Big Data provides data insights by processes datasets at a granular level to give the manufacturer scientifically-proven reasons to later manufacture behaviours and processes that can assuredly increase yields of the organisation.
Furthermore, Big Data has allowed the advent of the Build-To-Order approach which trends configurable products to meet the clients. After Big Data capturing optimises the capability of manufacturing decision-makers to make specific decisions even in the most critical environments confidently. Big Data studies the customer buying patterns and the availability and limitations of the manufacturers across different situations so that the company would never back down an opportunity to harvest yields.
How does CEREXIO Big Data Frameworks help?
Cerexio provides Big Data tackling technological solutions and modern tools that your convoluted data systems can equip for better Big Data harnessing. Cerexio Big Data frameworks are catered to allow you to employ your data to capture the unlimited potentials of Big Data Analytics with fully-fledged data managing models and frameworks federated for data sources for agile data processing. This solution is specifically made for data-heavy corporations that wish to exploit Big Data to drive towards corporate growth through better market positioning and confident ROI generations. With customised dashboards with user-friendly interfaces, your data scientist and analysts will have the luxury of filtering out actionable insights to supercharge your corporate endeavours astoundingly.
The era of data-driven societies, industries and global phenomena is not so far away! Also, with the manufacturing world being variant, complexed, restrained or anchored with the lack of process-mitigation techniques, it requires Big Data harnessing more than any other field. Manufacturing firms with better big data capturing can effortlessly set themselves ahead while keeping their competitors at bay. The trick to optimal big data capturing is to start collecting data as early as possible. Therefore, there will be more information when you get to adopt the latest data-tackling innovations. Therefore, Big Data Analytics and Big Data-dependent technologies are no longer ‘nice-to-have capabilities’ for manufacturing companies, but they are now ‘not-to-be-missed capabilities’.
