The Rise of Digital Factories and its Challenges for Full Implementation

The little coffee capsules are one of today’s modern inventions that you would have either seen or made your coffee from in your coffee machine. Along with their en masse production in a factory, what’s little known is their end-to-end journey from being birthed to being packed.

Interestingly but not surprisingly, a fully digitalized or automated factory can do all that’s required with putting the capsules together, from start to finish. I had the pleasure of visiting our Orange Customer Innovation Center (CIC) in Paris – a space for experimentation and collaboration with a co-innovation approach. It offers a real-time smart industry showcase of a fully digitalized, high-performance coffee factory production that would transform what you might think of a digital factory.

A digital factory leverages upon digitalization and automation as enablers to optimize continuous data flows that offer valuable insights into the lifecycle of products and production for smart decision-making. This means that advanced technology through secure and robust connectivity is optimized to streamline operations, boost productivity, reduce errors, and enable real-time monitoring.

How it works

The digitalization steps encompass quality control and beans’ sorting, grinding, distribution of pod base (empty capsules), dosing, tamping, and sealing, which involve several control and packaging devices and mechanism across a network infrastructure and powered by different solutions.

Here’s how it works. At the start of production, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems would enable the status of production lines to be monitored in real time – from machine status to performance data for improving productivity, and the operational efficiency of the environment.

The stage of condition monitoring would provide indicators tailored to each production cycle and manage the fluidity of the manufacturing processes to minimise any losses. Thermal imaging quality control then helps to detect irregularities or defects before it moves into quality control.

Moving further into the advanced module, the filtering takes place by sorting out non-compliance capsules and their weight / colors, before they are deemed to have passed the test to be sealed, packed, and customized where needed.

Benefits and pain points

In the illustrated real-life example of the coffee factory at the CIC, the transformation of manufacturing processes and old-school facilities into a fully digital factory has shown to deliver multiple benefits to businesses.

From increased efficiency and faster productivity / speed-to-market to data-driven maintenance and boost in innovation such as hyper-customization of customer products, there are multiple measurable outcomes with boost in business performance.

However, the hard truth is that not all digital factory implementations would end up offering advantages to the respective organizations. Realizing a concept into a full-scale model can be riddled with different challenges and bottlenecks along the deployment process.

Aligning these challenges are important to ensure the successful conversion to a digital factory, and recognizing what can be done at the onset based on the following

i)    Employee training and talent recruitment

• Skilled human workers are required to intelligently operate machines or implement a digitalization strategy or plans for a smart manufacturing environment to take place. Hence, humans need to be upskilled or reskilled to evolve alongside technology and solutions. 
• Besides the IT talent gap, resistance to changes is often cited as a foremost challenge. 

ii)    Leadership support

• The management team / leaders need to be onboard with the full implementation and a comprehensive understanding of the requirements and challenges – i.e. what to invest in, the complexities involved and how to overcome, and how deployment can take place in phases. 
• The lack of vision or proper planning by top management is also a common cause for failure to take off.

iii)    Integration of existing technology with new components

• Thorough planning and a well-thought-out process is required to integrate an organization’s existing business technology stack with new elements, or to interconnect between its machines and systems so that they ‘talk to each other with its multitude of data sources / platforms’.
• There’s also the need to consider legacy infrastructure that is hard to migrate / shift

iv)    Acute interpretation and analysis of data to be actionized

• Requires a precise understanding and interpretation of data from the industrial equipment to facilitate actions and better decision-making across the board
• Cross-functional involvement and transparency that keeps factory floor employees in the loop for them to take ownership of decisions and provide active advice on what needs to be done when a situation calls for.

v)    Budget allocation

• Upgrading to a digital factory requires investments and funding, hence understanding priorities and what impacts that are to be achieved in the long run would help set aside the costs required. 
• Start with baby steps before gradually scaling up. 
   

Meeting challenges head-on with solutions

While our digital factory is a proof point that shows how plants can implement digitalization to scale their production, it requires working through some of the mentioned challenges and building an equally adept digital workforce. 

The silo functions between IT teams and the rest of the organization’s business departments need to be blurred so that teams can better leverage on the value-add of smart manufacturing or digital factory to achieve key outcomes and run the successful initiative and implementation.

Orange Business can support customers in transforming and optimizing their businesses with our end-to-end expertise in integration, connectivity, infrastructure, application and sustainable digitalization of assets, people, processes, and workflows. Our network and cybersecurity modules are also available to offer secure connectivity, strong recovery capability, and compliance with OT cyber regulations to keep your production facility resilient and available without disruption throughout the lifecycle. 
 

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