Indian factories and automation: The 'everything bagel' is here

Gone are the days when intelligent machines, software and tools only touched limited areas in a manufacturing setup. Now every ingredient is covered with new tech sprinkled all over- from design departments to assembly-lines to maintenance to QA and warehouses. Will this taste better than before, though? Perhaps, a special sauce for India could take it all a notch up. Let's bite in.

- By Pratima H

What was once just some occasional cherry on the cake, has now become an all-you-want seasoning. The bagel of manufacturing is now surpassing the doughnut phase of intelligent automation.

From the initial, and obvious, surface-areas of immediate sweet-spots like banking, retail and IT; advanced automation breakthroughs like robots, visual intelligence, AI, connectivity, analytics and sensors are now entering the more savoury sides of business landscape. Some factories in India are designing and making better products, making them faster, making them with smarter QA, and in machines that can be not just run but maintained without too much sweat. It's the turn of factories now to smell this new technology-spread.

Whether it is Mahindra Accelo trying to rethink real-time plant visibility, optimised production, and improved quality control; or contract manufacturer Dixon Technologies exploring AI-powered Industry 4.0 across 24 plants; or Chitale Dairy milking IoT and RFID; or Foxconn handing over 80 per cent production tasks to AI and planning use of humanoid robots; or Ola using digital twins for faster design to commissioning in manufacturing operations (Spinning up its largest 2-wheeler plant in just eight months)- the bagel of a typical Indian factory is neither boring nor stale anymore. And it's getting hotter and hotter.

The future of robotics and physical automation in manufacturing involves native AI integration for adaptability, human-robot collaboration, swarm robotics intelligence, and robot-as-a-service (RaaS) models lowering lower entry barriers, observes Charlie Dai, VP and principal analyst at Forrester.

Automation is entering a new phase where these technologies are not just improving operations but fundamentally changing how businesses are built and run, highlights Sivakumar Krishnamoorthy, Sr. GM, Sales and Marketing, Epson India Pvt Ltd.

SLICING THE BAGEL- WHAT'S INSIDE?