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Optimising the manufacturing industry through digitisation
The UAE’s manufacturing sector has been remarkably agile. Vibhu Kapoor, regional vice president, Middle East, Africa and India at Epicor, highlights three trends that will shape the industry.
MANUFACTURERS MUST KEEP one eye on the drawing board, ready to change when the need arises. Meanwhile, they must investigate every part of their operations and sniff out opportunities for streamlining processes.
The UAE’s recently launched Industrial Technology Transformation Index (ITTI) is aimed at formally assessing the readiness of UAE manufacturers and advising them on the best ways to digitise their operations. What will emerge from this programme is likely a further acceleration of technology implementation, which I believe, will be defined by three main adoption trends.
Connected cloud environment
The cloud’s capacity to optimise is what makes it so attractive to manufacturing decisionmakers whose principal concerns are efficient production and minimal waste. In a tight market, high yields and customer satisfaction also play leading roles. Cloudnative ERP solutions help connect the business in a way that premisesbased platforms cannot. All stakeholders have critical information at their fingertips, on their device of choice, and at the time of their convenience.
This means that information silos are swept away and replaced with centralised repositories of corporate wisdom which detail the entirety of the production lifecycle, from design and resource procurement to production and sales. This connected environment is, of course, a boon to realtime operations, but it also offers opportunities to finetune those processes
Investing in quality data
Manufacturing has always used data to optimise individual processes, deliveries, warehousing, and sales. But now, data has become central to the overarching strategy of businesses. However, when it comes to data, we should think in terms of quality over quantity. Clean, accurate data will give actionable insights, and suboptimal data may hurt more than it helps. Part of the challenge of ensuring that an organisation has access to sufficient data lies in the existence of silos — fiefdoms of ownership characterised by a territorial claim to data. If it is financial data, it should belong to finance; and if it is employee data, it should belong to HR. These barriers must be demolished, and data must be united in a store owned by everybody. A common data model will ensure each team has a comprehensive view, not only of what matters to them most, but of how their work fits into the enterprise as a whole.
Automation and integration
UAE manufacturers should look out for opportunities to integrate new tools that have the potential to supercharge their entire technology environment. Given the leading role the UAE has played in the rollout of 5G networks, we can expect many local and regional technology companies to offer IoT solutions that will bolt into the existing cloud environment and into ERP systems. This will represent a sea of change in the capabilities of the modern manufacturer, in terms of optimisation and predictive maintenance ■
