Why digital production is essential for companies

People have been talking about digital production, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), industrial metaverse and AI for years. But the actual implementation is often difficult. In this blog series on digital production, we show how the concept can be successfully implemented in sectors such as mechanical engineering, automotive, the process industry and life sciences.

In this blog post, we will first address the following questions: Why do we need digital production? What specific added value does it offer? And why is it so difficult to implement this concept in production, while other parts of the value chain are already further along?

Planning and control

A look at the life sciences industry shows a clear trend towards personalised medicine.

We are seeing more and more products for very specific and therefore smaller patient populations. For production, this means that the number of variants or products is constantly increasing and the average number of units per variant is decreasing. Production has to be much more flexible today. At the same time, the pressure to reduce costs remains.

Customers expect short delivery times and want to order as late as possible in order to keep stock levels low when demand fluctuates. Flexibility is therefore crucial here too.

In order to guarantee the required flexibility while maximising productivity, production must be controlled in a targeted manner. This is often difficult for two reasons: firstly, there is no up-to-date picture of the current status of production, and secondly, the systems along the automation pyramid are often not yet fully integrated, which means that valuable time is lost due to manual interfaces, resulting in longer throughput times than are actually necessary. However, this can only be done in a targeted manner if the current production status and the cause-and-effect relationships of problems in production are known and the effectiveness of interventions can therefore be assessed. All this is no longer possible with pen and paper, but only with a corresponding degree of digitalisation.

Digital production therefore means integrating the various IT and OT systems in production as far as possible and thus creating a comprehensive and interpretable database. This means that production employees have an up-to-date overview of production at all times, can plan better and control their production in a more targeted manner. Intelligent algorithms also continuously improve the planning results. Depending on the target system of your own production, this leads to greater flexibility, shorter throughput times, lower inventories, higher delivery reliability or lower production costs.

Analysis and optimisation

Optimisation projects such as value stream or REFA analyses were previously carried out with pen and paper. However, these potentials have largely been recognised and exhausted. Further optimisation potential can only be tapped with the help of data and intelligent algorithms.

In contrast to other specialist areas, however, production is characterised by a high degree of heterogeneity in hardware and software systems. This means that data is available in decentralised form, whether in the PLC, in local shop floor applications or in software systems such as ERP, MES or PLM. Different experts, such as PLC developers, MES and SAP specialists, are often required to collect and analyse this data selectively. This makes analyses very time-consuming and expensive overall. In reality, the ROI of individual projects is therefore often disappointingly low.

In digital production, the data is described semantically in a standardised way and structured centrally so that it is available to all those involved to analyse and optimise their respective processes. This does require initial investment in the necessary technologies, such as an IoT or modern data platform. Overall, however, subsequent optimisation projects can be implemented much more easily and quickly.

Challenges during the introduction

Historically, production systems have grown organically. Most factories have a variety of different hardware, IT and OT systems, with each factory often having a unique setup. Often there is not even one MES within a factory, but a multitude of different shop floor applications.

In addition, IT and production were organised and worked separately in the past. IT was often organisationally assigned to the CFO and focused on classic IT systems such as ERP or CRM. OT, on the other hand, was usually the responsibility of the COO or CTO and generally did not have the opportunity to employ software engineers. Instead, IT-savvy production engineers developed so-called shadow IT systems to solve specific problems. Over the years, this has led to a multitude of applications and systems that are often insecure and difficult to manage and maintain.

These challenges can only be overcome if IT and OT grow closer together. This is referred to as IT-OT convergence. This refers not only to the technical side, but above all to the organisational side: IT and OT experts need to find a common language and work more closely together.

Because only together is it possible to integrate different systems, ensure security, manageability and maintainability and standardise and harmonise in-house processes across all production sites in a meaningful way. We have seen in our projects that the effort is worth it. We will show you exactly how this works in the next blog posts.

Would you like to find out more about other exciting topics from the world of adesso? Then take a look at our previous blog posts.

You can find out more about "Digital Production" on our website.