Change is the way of life and change is always driven by innovations that come up to suffice the need for improvement in all segments which are correlating the socio-economic system in the society.

Manufacturing is the backbone of any society that facilitates society needs related to ease of operations, productivity enhancements and better life with use of machines, tools and accessories that are manufactured based on the engineering designs, chemical formulations and electronic innovations.

For the day the wheel was invented, (the first mechanical innovations) humans have been engaged in analysing and practising methods that had helped them to boost the production outputs and enhance the life quality of the team working on the production floor.

This has led to the multiple industrial revolutions that have played an important part in shaping the economy of the nations as manufacturing processes have a direct impact on the GDP of any nation.

Following mechanization, electrification, and automation, we are now standing on the threshold of the fourth industrial revolution – intelligentization. Intelligence will be embedded into everything, including business processes.

Technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres of global production systems.

The current pace of technological development is exerting profound changes on the way people live and work. It is impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, perhaps none more so than production, including how, what, why and where individuals produce and deliver products and services.

However, amid overcharged media headlines and political and social landscapes, business and government leaders find it difficult not only to have an accurate understanding of where these technologies can create real value, but also to successfully focus on the appropriate and timely investments and policies needed to unlock that value.

To address some of these issues and shed light on technology’s impact on global production systems, the World Economic Forum introduced the System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Production at the beginning of 2016.

Lot of innovations in ICT are recommended for usage for the proposed intelligent factories of the future. The innovations have broadly been classified as:

• Emerging technologies – technologies that are under development phase.
• Maturing technologies – technologies that are developed and are under pilot testing.
• Mainstream technologies – technologies that are already tested and simulated and being used in the field.

The key mainstream technologies that are really impacting the manufacturing vertical are mentioned below:

• Robotics with AI
• 5G Wireless
• 3D Printing
• Advances in IoT integration
• Wearable for Staff digitization
• Big Data Analytics

These technologies will bring changes in the convergence of automation industrial tools and other ICT systems that would lead to better co-ordination and analysis with machinery data related to production getting integrated to the main stream ERP in real time. Also this is like to Impact all associated with manufacturing i.e. factories, firm, industry vertical, staff and the society.

The revolutionary technologies will not work unless and until the same is supported by properly laid infrastructure with supporting tools and accessories. We at Telecom and Management consultants recommend the following designs guidelines to ensure that the above mentioned technologies works well. The guidelines are:

• Green and clean energy is one of the most impacting factors in the manufacturing segment for reducing the carbon foot prints and creating an eco-balance. For the same we recommend use of solar panels or Windmills based on the availability of spaces in the manufacturing campus and apart from this one use POE enabled lightings with optimum usage of day light.
• The above mentioned technologies will generate huge data that has to travel to and fro from the data center in an unblocking manners and all the applications will use a single backbone as there will be convergence of ICT and MES (Manufacturing execution system). To cater to this and futuristic traffic requirements that is bound to generate a lot of video traffic we should have robust scalable and upgradable converged networking backbone that would ensure seamless flow of traffic in a non-blocking mode.
• Wearables, Robots etc. need access of the network in real-time for which high speed Wireless networks using secured high-speed Wi-Fi or Li-Fi should be built along the production, back offices to ensures seamless connectivity for the Wearables, BYOD’s, Scanners and other telemetry and IoT devices which will transmit data over the IP backbone.
• Since MIS and MES will converge the foundation in DC should be strong enough to provide processing capabilities capable of delivering data in line with the network speeds. For these, we need to deploy high speed virtualized servers with SANs that SSD’s/Flash with high IOPS and enough storage capacities as per the application requirements.
• Create efficient and compliant intercommunication tools within the plant
  Support remote logistics and sales offices with high-speed WAN backbones using Service provider networks like MPLS or VPN over leased lines.
• Create mobile apps co-linked to the master site for facilitating communication and real-time data access related to inventory stocks etc. on mobile devices for the field and mobile staff.

This is just a brief of the setup we are recommending in general for more details contact us on info@tandmconsultants.com