Developments

Is low-code the future of manufacturing?

Jornt Moerland, Regional Vice President APAC of Mendix. Business leaders have been losing sleep in face of various challenges within the manufacturing industry. Decreasing production output, labour shortages, ongoing supply chain disruptions and inflation are just a few to be named. As noted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, almost a third of all Australian employing businesses are having difficulty finding suitable staff, and more than two in five businesses have been facing supply chain disruptions since January 2022. In the past, low-code application development has been deployed by manufacturing companies as a ‘nice-to-have’, connecting peripheral devices and supporting logistics. However, business leaders are progressively recognising the extended value in low-code, rapidly adopting low-code platforms throughout all core domains and business activities, including engineering, product design, and quality control. According to Gartner, by 2024, 65 percent of all app development functions will use low-code application building, with 66 percent of big companies using at least four low-code platforms at once. But what makes low-code the future when it comes to improving manufacturing and supply chain efficiencies? A method built for agility, mobility and scalability For many IT leaders, there is still some confusion between Business Process Management (BPM) software and low-code. It’s important to note that, while they share some similarities, low-code and BPM have some fundamental differences when it comes to capabilities and application. While BPM models and streamlines business processes and has a less-targeted application, low-code simplifies the creation and delivery of apps and functions, often addressing specific customer needs and allowing for greater flexibility and customisation. While manufacturers are trying to integrate on manufacturing floors IoT devices that can be controlled from anywhere, any time, the rapid adoption of these devices means that they must now develop supporting applications at an ever-faster pace, straining the traditional development […]

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Network Monitoring – The competitive differentiator in manufacturing

By Sebastian Krueger, Vice President APAC, Paessler Every industrial revolution brings along a learning revolution. Digitisation is transforming the world in ways people a few decades ago would have hardly imagined. You hail a taxi ride to take you to the best restaurant in town using your smartphone and get items you ordered just yesterday delivered to your home. The list is endless. At the core of it lie technologies that have enabled these changes, which are also disrupting areas like manufacturing, automation, and energy. All these technologies have one thing in common: data. Data takes center stage in the converged IT/OT era Today, data has become a critical component to optimise your business to be more competitive, or to develop new business models based on analytical insights. One well-known term in this regard is Industry 4.0, which caters to the ultimate goal of optimising the entire value chain of a product including development, manufacturing, usage, maintenance, and even recycling. This is enabled through modern technologies and the intelligent connection between humans, machines, factories, and the end product. Digital infrastructure like cloud-hosted systems, its local production network, or simply a web shop comprises the key technology stack for a company that decides to move into the future. The convergence of Information and Operational Technology (IT/OT), Industry 4.0 and increased digitisation have all reshaped the way the production floor connects and interacts with IT. This interconnectivity makes it pertinent to have a unified overview of your entire infrastructure. These include programmable logic controllers, industrial PCs, smart industrial gateways, sensor technologies, as well as traditional IT infrastructure components like network switches, routers, and wireless devices. Monitoring it all requires an integrated solution that can coalesce OT and IT together into a single view. Why do you need holistic monitoring for your industrial IT? In […]

Siemens and Nissan collaborate to digitalise production lines for new crossover electric vehicle Ariya

Siemens, a leading supplier in the field of automation and industrial software, cooperates with Nissan to build production lines for the new all-electric crossover Nissan Ariya at the company’s plant in Tochigi, Japan. Both companies build on their long-standing cooperation. Nissan had already been using the Siemens Digital Industries software portfolio to optimize design and production. End-to-end digital threads enable Nissan to connect a wide variety of sources of information across product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms. “The successful launch of the new production lines is a milestone in the collaboration of the two companies,” says Cedrik Neike, Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO Digital Industries CEO. “Climate change and stringent environmental regulations are powerful drivers for the development of electrified powertrains. We will bring in all of our cutting-edge technologies to this collaboration to enable a highly flexible, efficient and sustainable automotive production. “At our Nissan Intelligent Factory in Tochigi, we are building the future of mobility. It enables us to not only improve the work environment but also to realise a zero-emission production system. To digitalise our new electric vehicle production line, we chose to work with Siemens, our innovation partner and one of the leading companies in industrial automation and digitalisation, because they have the necessary expertise in this area,” says Teiji Hirata, Corporate vice president, Vehicle Production Engineering and Development Division at Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. The system architecture of Nissan’s newly developed electric powertrain aims to standardise the processing and assembly of the powertrain. It includes Siemens’ safety PLC Simatic S7-1500, ET200SP distributed I/ O module as Siemens One Single Solution (OSS). Profinet creates end-to-end communication from the field to the management level, and the engineering framework TIA Portal has also fully integrated all automation devices. This enables complete access to the […]

Delivering supply chain resiliency across the fabricated metals industry with ERP

By Roger Landman, Head of Product Management at SYSPRO The fabricated metals industry inherently runs on very slim margins due to factors like fluctuating material costs, direct and indirect labour and overhead expenses. Global raw material costs are often dictated by the London Metal Exchange (LME), the largest exchange for options and futures contracts for base metals, which includes steel, aluminium, zinc, lead, copper and nickel. Besides the volatility of external global factors, the industry is also expected to meet specific, made-to-order, customer demands. With all these factors at play, it comes as no surprise that the industry is so heavily reliant on specific raw materials suppliers, manufacturing processes, labour and outbound logistics requirements. With ongoing supply chain disruptions, competitive advantage is being lost. According to the recent SYSPRO survey entitled ‘Realigning the links of the disconnected supply chain’, 82 percent of fabricated metal businesses have experienced supply chain and material handling disruptions, further eroding diminishing margins and ultimately customer service. Despite these challenges, only 12 percent of businesses have systems that support in servicing external customers. To build resiliency, metal fabricators should consider the right technology solutions to improve operational efficiencies, enhance external collaboration and meet unique customer demands. Maintaining a consistent supply of raw materials For decades, China has been a leading supplier of raw materials to the fabricated metals industry, partly due to its competitive pricing to match low industry margins. Russia has also been a top producer of materials such as aluminium, steel and nickel. But raw materials don’t just stop at metals. Gasses like Oxygen and Argon are essential in the welding of carbon steel and some high alloy steels. With ongoing challenges like global lockdowns, sanctions and other unavoidable disasters, distribution of these materials has also been severely delayed. Last year, several countries experienced […]

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The missing link in Industry 4.0’s connectivity chain

While IoT has transformed industry, there are still challenges when it comes to streamlining deployment. Here, Amr Houssein, managing director of eSIM pioneer Mobilise, explains how eSIMs complete IoT connectivity. In short, the industrial IoT (IIoT) enables machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, making manufacturing facilities smart and digitalised. By using sensors to capture factory floor data, manufacturers gain a comprehensive overview of their facility to optimise processes, improve machine performance, reduce waste and energy consumption, and result in less unexpected downtime. Getting manufacturers connected Connecting IoT devices over a mobile network is referred to as the cellular IoT. Using existing mobile networks removes the need for a separate, dedicated infrastructure. Instead, a range of networks can be used — whether that’s 3G, 4G, 5G, or IoT-specific networks. LTE-M and NB-IoT are networks designed specifically for IoT connections. While LTE- M offers a lower price point and voice and SMS support, NB-IoT offers low power, low data usage for long range and reliability. Whichever network is used, connecting devices to the cellular IoT through the traditional SIM cards presents several challenges for manufacturers. Deployment difficulties An IoT SIM card has traditionally been responsible for connecting a device to the network. But it doesn’t come without its challenges. IoT SIM cards typically only allow a device to connect to one carrier network. When deploying devices globally across multiple networks, or working with devices that are involved in the supply chain or logistics that move across the world, this creates a logistical nightmare. Manufacturers must source and distribute physical SIMs for a local network for each device. As SIM cards need to be removable for maintenance or carrier changes, IoT devices cannot be sealed, meaning that harsh operating conditions are more likely to damage a device. There are also the added concerns that having a […]

NX delivers greater cross-discipline collaboration and knowledge capture

The latest release of Siemens’ NX software, brings greater electronic co-design, collaboration, and intelligence capture and reuse capability. These empower engineering executives across every industry to find productivity improvements and greater efficiencies in their engineering departments. Part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio of software and services, NX delivers productivity and user-experience enhancements across a broad range of capabilities. Leveraging leadership and expertise in the electronics/electrical engineering space with Siemens EDA (formerly Mentor Graphics), NX extends its electronic design collaboration capabilities further with a robust workflow for rigid and rigid-flex PCB designs. These are especially important given increased product complexity and packaging constraints. Users will notice a new codeless approach to Feature Templates that enables the reuse of the knowledge embedded into NX data during design. This elevates user-defined features to the next level, extending data reuse from pure parametric geometry features to include PMI, requirements checks and more. The key benefit is a jump start of efficient knowledge reuse and greater collaboration amongst design and engineering teams. NX is renowned for its leadership in complex shape development and whatever the industry sector customers operate within, aesthetic quality is now just as important as functionality, efficiency and performance. The latest release of NX brings new tools to help develop the forms designers need and their customers demand, whether that’s updates to curve creation and editing with parametric features or to NX Algorithmic Modeling which better support convergent modeling workflows enabling more efficient ways to complex patterns and shapes. NX Topology Optimiser now fully replaces and surpasses previous solution capabilities. Part optimisation within the context of an assembly now considers design and manufacturing constraints and makes simultaneous optimisation of multiple design spaces with independent materials possible. The recently introduced NX Design Space Explorer for multi-objective optimization also now offers multi-run support to […]

The missing link in Industry 4.0’s connectivity chain

A good obsolescence plan can keep your plant up and running

Unplanned downtime is a manufacturer’s worst nightmare. The nightmare worsens if goods on the idle production line are perishable food and beverages, as too much of a delay can lead to product losses. Manufacturing lines are complex systems made of thousands of parts, each doing their own important job. If one part fails, this has a cascading effect up and down the production line, to the extent that production may come to a complete halt. When this occurs, there are two options: perform a repair on the broken part, or replace or upgrade the entire system. While system upgrades have their own merits, they are expensive and entail large windows of undesirable, costly downtime while old systems are removed and new ones are installed and commissioned. The alternative approach is to replace the broken part, which sounds simple and should be much quicker than replacing the entire system. However, if the offending part turns out to be obsolete — that is, no longer manufactured by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) — then a quick task suddenly becomes more difficult. This is because quality obsolete parts are notoriously difficult to source so, if manufacturers are not prepared in advance, they may find themselves having to shut down production for much longer than initially anticipated. Furthermore, if corners are cut to find cheaper replacements, or if parts are bought simply because they were the easiest to find, manufacturers are liable to incur repeated downtime as lower-quality parts are likely to fail again, and quickly. As industrial systems typically have long lifespans, they are especially susceptible to broken parts, and are more likely to contain obsolete parts. That is why it’s important to have a comprehensive obsolescence plan in place. Obsolescence audit An effective obsolescence plan should involve a full systems audit, to […]

Unlock the value of data to drive business intelligence

By Kevin Dherman, CIO at SYSPRO Data forms the backbone of any manufacturing enterprise. With continuous supply chain disruptions, the allure of data and Business Intelligence (BI) is the ability to look deeper into production, performance, and efficiency. For today’s industries the issue isn’t whether they’re generating enough data, it’s whether they’re getting value from that data. SYSPRO research reveals that only 20 percent of manufacturing and distribution businesses have looked at investing in big data analytics tools to process and analyse data in response to ongoing disruptions, and only five percent of businesses have investigated the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to draw any long-term benefits from data collection. As industries look to digitally transform to the factory of the future in a data-first world, investment in technologies is irrelevant without data analytics to understand the internal and external factors impacting a business. Without the right data insights businesses are unable to compete with global supply chains as they don’t have the visibility to anticipate shifts and respond to market changes. Here’s how manufacturers can obtain visibility across the entire operation and collect accurate real-time data to not only automate processes but make data-driven decisions that drive the factory of the future: Actionable insights with ERP Ultimately, ERP fuels data-driven decision making and drives business intelligence. It allows information to be centralised and organised into readable reports and dashboards. With a variety of valuable KPIs, metrics and more information at their fingertips, they can act on new opportunities, respond to issues, and make informed decisions quickly. A SYSPRO customer, Ruprecht, was able to tackle supply chain disruptions and remain competitive through leveraging data insights. The business which supplies ready-to-eat food products in the US integrated their ERP system with AI and a predictive model to maintain […]

Why 3D printing in healthcare is imperative for sustainable healing

Lim Jing (Ph.D.) Chief Technology Officer, Osteopore Three dimensional or “3D printing” is an additive manufacturing process that has been around for a while now – but is still guaranteed to attract attention. It produces a physical object from a digital design, and it’s been creating a buzz in the healthcare industry since the 1990s when dental implants and custom prosthetics took off. While there are many different types of 3D printing available, harnessing the technological advantage that 3D printing has over traditional manufacturing techniques is the key to its success. This involves creating a microstructure that is representative of native bone while meeting gross geometrical needs of the reconstruction area. Specifically, making use of the body’s regenerative capacity to rebuild lost tissues and the use of bioresorbable materials in implants leverage the combined technologies of tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and 3D printing techniques. 3D printing technology has allowed us to make ground-breaking regenerative implants – our bioresorbable implant is the first of its kind to be successfully developed and commercialised for surgical use, and we see this technology as the way of the future for healthcare. When used appropriately, we find the solutions created with 3D printing regularly outperform traditional implant methods in terms of design and associated long-term healthcare costs. 3D printing allows the creation of complex geometries that copy the shape and function of natural bone and allows efficient productisation particularly in customised implants. Given the complex nature of bone microarchitecture, it is not a matter of course that production can happen at cost effective scale – and 3D manufacturing gives us that option. With improvements to technology, we can go down the path of automation, producing our implants around-the-clock and even remotely; there is a compelling commercial industrial argument for the technology alongside medical […]

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