Companies that had not implemented Industry 4.0 prior to COVID-19 have had a wake-up call. In a bid to assist global manufacturers in managing industry upgrade and automation, a webinar named “Smart Manufacturing: Driving Agility” was brought by Taiwan Excellence, the symbol of Taiwan’s most innovative products, on October 14, 2021. Participants tuned in to learn about the benefits and challenges of smart manufacturing and how it might shape the market in the future.
To share the knowledge and special insights on the trends of smart manufacturing, how to transform into Industry 4.0 that optimizes manufacturing process and drives agility in a Malaysian context, three panel speakers were invited to present at the webinar, including two representatives from Taiwan Excellence Awarded brands – Advantech and Hiwin; and the last one was the ABB Malaysia Sdn Bhd. The webinar was moderated by Karamjit Singh from Digital News Asia.
Major Trends in Smart Manufacturing Transformation
The discussion started with the panel speakers introducing their companies and products that aim to help their clients capitalize on Industry 4.0 and transform towards smart manufacturing.
Ryan Lai, Asean Business Development Manager of Advantech Co. Malaysia mentioned the major trends of smart manufacturing transformation are to accelerate digitalization, to restructure supply chain and to have ESG sustainability, while preventive maintenance on machinery operation to reduce downtime is equally important.
Mr. R Narayanan, Country Managing Director of ABB Malaysia Sdn Bhd further stated that with the world depending more than ever on connectivity and the exchange of data, digitalization will drive agility for smart manufacturing to achieve new height of performance and sustainable progress.
The discussion continued with the presentation from Tean Shen Zen, Sales Manager (Malaysia and Indonesia) of Hiwin Singapore Pte Ltd. While most of his clients are from the SME sector, he said SMEs need to have well-planned development phases and stages to transform from traditional to become digitalized and automated.
Smart Manufacturing for SME sector – Driving Agility and the Struggles
According to Ryan, agility is to promote operational excellence. While SMEs represents the majority of the manufacturing sector in Malaysia, many of them are in fact still in Industry 2.0 or 3.0 level. Apart from the consideration on the investment costs, SME challenge is to find out how to transform from the current stage to become Industry 4.0 viable, which lies in their abilities to carefully plan out the digital roadmap and direction for this paradigm shift. It can be a long journey.
From Mr. Narayanan’s view, agility is the subset of smart manufacturing. Speed and product variants are the main concerns in the manufacturing concept. With the increase in backlog orders under the current post-pandemic stage, Industry 4.0 can help these SMEs increase productivity, enhance flexibility, reduce downtime and generate exponential growth.
On the other hand, for Mr. Tean, agility is about production efficiency and smart manufacturing is the key for SMEs to resolve some of the labour issues to meet demands from both local and export markets.
Challenges for transformation to Industrial 4.0
- According to the panel speakers, below are some of the major challenges being discussed for Industrial 4.0 implementation to smart manufacturing: Proper mindset and education to transform;
- How to make use of the large amount of big data collected to improve downtime, to increase productivity, to react faster to growing market dynamics and etc.;
- Investment requirement and budgeting – how to sustain through the transformation journey. The advice is to secure financial assistance through government grants and subsidies or soft loans;
- Labour issue – jobs will not be eliminated as human-machine interaction becomes the new norm.
Mr. Tean further concluded that “Start now or you never start at all. So, don’t wait! Otherwise, will be eliminated”. Indeed, today’s digital age is an unusual time for manufacturing. Industry 4.0 provides a game changing opportunity and capability to rethink operations, enhance data streams, automate and apply AI insights that build more flexible and resilient operations.
These are only some of the highlights from the Webinar. To find out more innovative concepts on smart manufacturing, please watch the replay at here
