OCTOBER 2020
Sambit Sengupta
Associate Director – Solution Sales, Avnet Asia
BIG PICTURE
Avnet Believes That Each Smart Factory Solution Has To Be Bespoke What is a Smart factory, what it takes to build a Smart Factory, Why Companies are opting for Smart Factories? Finding answers for the pondering answers, Niloy from BISinfotech gets alongside for an extensive exchange of words with Sambit Sengupta, Associate Director – Solution Sales, Avnet Asia. Sambit defines the potential of Smart Factories solutions in India as enormous. From security to Avnet’s expertise and leadership in this nascent yet bullish sector, Sambit underlines the de facto future of Smart Factories. Edited Nub Below.
According to you, what is a perfect Smart factory (implementation, technology barriers, and cost) and how promising is this sector? Impact of Industrial Robotics is assessing, executing A smart factory is all about increasing efficiency in different operations while providing productivity and efficiency?
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functional areas of the existing factory. In working closely with our customers, we understand from them that despite multiple technology advancements (both in-house or collaborative work with vendors), some pain points remain at the execution level. They include: 1. Legacy industrial control systems that are prone to cyber threats when connected online 2. Lack of real-time data and disparate data systems 3. Keeping abreast of regulations and managing compliance 4. Balancing maintenance with throughput
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not see a return on investment (ROI), and ROI is determined not just by costs. Many times, we think that smart factory implementation will reduce cost, which is the eventual outcome, but if the business outcome is tallied with increased efficiency or throughput, then ROI becomes visible. All factories need to be smarter and the digital innovators of each company are working on KPIs which needs very agile implementation. A typical smart factory implementation does not concentrate on cost saving by eliminating jobs but eliminates the pain points, improves efficiency exponentially and that makes the business profitable.
Smart factory implementation requires on-the-go access with cloud-based system, optimized efficiency and most importantly a seamless integration of different sensors and edge devices, on-premises data gateways and finally, data ingestion into the cloud. After which, there is a huge amount of analytics required. This is a promising sector with growth prospects as there is ongoing innovation. Furthermore, with the advancement in smart sensors and cloud technologies, companies will enjoy more intelligent services at a cheaper cost. But often, the analytics portion is done as an afterthought and becomes a major technology barrier. The cost escalates if stakeholders do
Industrial robotics has been around since the early 1960s and has been used in welding, machine tending, and assembling in factories. The automation needs of smart factories have accelerated the growth of industrial robots from being standalone robots to collaborative and mobile robots. More integration of AI has made these industrial robots as efficient value adder in factory lines. Mobile robots or AGVs (Automatic guided vehicles) are becoming commonplace in modern factories in handling intralogistics.
Avnet for long has been a partner-first company. Given this sector, where solution providers to play the lead role, how Avnet can help to make Smart Factory a reality for customers?
Avnet works with system integrators as an end to end consulting partner to implement smart factory solutions. It is always a ‘partner first’ play for us. Partners appreciate the fact that Avnet has nearly 100 years of supply chain management expertise and in-house capability to integrate various devices to the cloud (device-to-cloud or D2C), as well as provide sophisticated and customized dashboards (cloud-to-device or C2D). We can also help our partners implement various AI and machine learning models which we have developed in
