Manage your Factory Remotely: Industry 4.0 and Operational Excellence

Manufacturing today is faced with several challenges that require technological solutions. Global supply chains are still grappling with the disruptions and uncertainties created by the covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, unprecedented lockdowns, border closures and the need for remote work have placed restrictions on workforce mobility. Production lines often do not have contingency plans in place when their usual resources are unavailable. Some manufacturing processes involve hazardous operations or entail security concerns such that unrestricted access is not possible.

The advent of the smart, connected factory and connected supply chains and operations have enabled real-time visibility and remote operations on a scale never imagined before. Automation has also been a key lever to bring in greater flexibility and agility in assembly lines besides enhancing safety through autonomous operations of hazardous processes.

It is especially true in the case of the United Arab Emirates, where the growing demand for localized manufacturing has led to large new investments in emerging technologies as part of government initiatives like Operation 300 billion and the Make it in the Emirates initiative.

On the 14th and 15th of June 2022, the UAE Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 Summit was held in Dubai, bringing governmental regulators, large-scale manufacturers, worldwide industry leaders, and innovative technology and solution suppliers together to debate the sector's future growth. Over 100 government regulators, large-scale manufacturers, worldwide industry experts, and innovative technology and solution providers attended the summit and provided their perspectives.

The Industry 4.0 transformation towards remote operability and monitoring is not only about staying up to date with changing industry requirements, it has been known to deliver positive business outcomes including:

• Operational excellence: Improved throughput by 8-12% along with reduced expert dependency
• Customer-centricity: End-to-end visibility across operations up to 100%, thus enabling customer-centric, customer-responsive business model
• Supply chain efficiency: Maintenance costs reduced by 15-25%
• Sustainability and Safety: Energy costs reduced by 12-20%

Remote factory management and monitoring can be applied in several use cases to drive delivery excellence across production, asset maintenance, data acquisition, energy management and supply chain control.

In the case of production, remote monitoring and management will enable providing the right information at the right time to the right people even when they are remote.Aggregated and drill down views of production data helps in visualizing KPIs such OEE, cycle time, yield, losses and provide timely notifications of critical events.

Bosch has been able to provide remote production visualization using its Indus 4.0 solution.

Asset maintenance involves subject matter expertise. Getting experts to every problem site is expensive and cumbersome. Remote telepresence solutions can help the field technician get remote guidance from an expert. This makes use of IOT and AR technologies. The solution makes the expert get a real-time view of the problem at hand and augments his diagnosis on the live video stream, which can be seen by the technician. The solution also provides the expert with real-time process signal data like temperature, pressure, and alarm information, etc. An expert can also send contextual documents to the technician using the solution. At Bosch, we have developed such remote telepresence solutions and are able to support our customers.

Bosch is one of the world’s first major industrial organizations to achieve complete carbon neutrality in its operations. Given our experience with energy management and proven expertise in IT product engineering, we leveraged our full-stack digitalization suite [Bosch DEEPSights] that connects and monitors assets to optimize energy and utility consumption. Pre-built asset and energy management templates, connectivity with legacy systems, additional sensorization to assess water quality, humidity and energy meters were all part of the drive to reduce the carbon footprint across Bosch plants in India.

Bosch DEEPSights, our energy and utilities analytics platform, has provided a unified approach for the remote monitoring, real-time visualizing, and management of energy consumption data. The result: about 9500+ MWh and 8000+ tons of CO2 saved, along with an integrated view of all manufacturing sites.

Bosch’s ongoing journey with Industry 4.0 has enabled better production, improved quality, and a lower carbon footprint worldwide. Digital transformation is key to achieving not only operational and cost efficiency, thus driving positive business outcomes, but also green manufacturing, sustainability, and zero emissions, in line with the regulatory requirements of various geographies.