In a Machine Design article by Rahul Garg, VP for Industrial Machinery & SMB Programs at Siemens Digital Industries Software, he addresses how smart manufacturing enables industrial companies to tackle the challenges associated with global competition, sustainability, supply chain mishaps and labor shortages.
The objective is efficiency – driving optimum factory utilization. Digitalization is the equalizer to achieving innovative levels of smart manufacturing. Previously, automation was used to reduce costs; however, now digitalization takes the manufacturing process to a new level.
“The foundation for achieving higher operation efficiencies is the convergence of OT and IT to uncover actionable insights,” says Rahul. “Using the wealth of data generated by factory operations technology (OT) from edge sensors and smart equipment, information technology (IT) can then store, retrieve, process, analyze and recommend action based on that digital data.”
And this data leads to a closed-loop manufacturing process that is continually optimized via closed-loop product quality, thus supporting a comprehensive digital twin of the manufacturing environment to maximize throughput.
Read more here.
Dr. Che is a Professor and the Director of the School of Information Security and Applied Computing in the GameAbove College of Engineering and Technology at Eastern Michigan University. Before his academic career, he worked as a system and network engineer in the IT industry for approximately 20 years. Dr. Che received his BE in Electrical Engineering and ME in Computer Engineering from Zhejiang University, his MS in Software Engineering from Bowling Green State University, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wayne State University. His main research interests are cybersecurity and computational intelligence. He is the author and co-author of multiple research publications and holds several IT and Cybersecurity professional certifications.
