Publication – The Economic Times
In today’s dynamic manufacturing landscape, businesses are constantly seeking strategies to drive growth and maintain their competitive edge. One such transformative strategy that is reshaping the industry is peripheral automation. By seamlessly integrating innovation and automation, peripheral automation empowers manufacturing businesses to unlock their true potential and achieve significant growth.
Peripheral automation fundamentally is about contextualizing core or standard business solutions by extending and enhancing their interfaces, covering their unique processes, approaches and information needs. This can be seen as an agile and highly adaptable layer on top of a more persistent records at the core. Thus, peripheral automation enables differentiation and strategy execution while leveraging robust, time tested, generic systems of records. business differentiation. By augmenting their systems, manufacturing businesses can enhance productivity, streamline operations, and optimize resource allocation. This approach allows companies to save costs, allocate resources more effectively, and invest in capacity building and product innovation.
Peripheral automation is usually achieved via a series of initiatives and experiments. This minimizes disruption and allows for confident scaling. In fact, the peripheral automation initiatives can at times lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive core digital initiatives via prototyping, business value assessment and user acceptance. These peripheral automation initiatives relate to aspects of data automation (connecting and aggregating core data records for visibility, insights and decision making), process automation (connecting activities, information, and controls for teams to act with awareness, confidence and timeliness), and intelligence (leveraging AI and ML ‘with your data to generate custom and unique interactions creating opportunities, effectiveness and transformative experiences).
Peripheral automation recognizes the importance and sanctity of core business records, including customer data, product information, transaction records, employee details, and asset data, allowing agility with confidence. Peripheral automation involves accessing, managing, and updating these records to suit the unique context, purpose, and requirements of the organization. Peripheral automation brings significant improvements across multiple operational areas in the manufacturing industry. The following may be a few examples:
Supply chain and procurement: By automating order placement, inventory management, and supplier collaboration, manufacturing businesses can optimize lead times, reduce costs, and minimize errors. Real-time data exchange facilitated by seamless system integration enhances decision- making and fosters collaborative relationships, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and a competitive edge.
Quality compliance and process optimization: Peripheral automation plays a crucial role in maintaining quality compliance and optimizing manufacturing processes. Peripheral automation can allow businesses to meet rapidly changing specifications and quality standards by automating quality checks, inspections, and data collection. Real-time monitoring and analysis enable the identification of process inefficiencies, driving productivity and ensuring consistent delivery of high-quality products. Dataaggregation from IoT devices embedded in products, plants, and equipment.
This data-driven approach provides valuable insights for product improvement and customization.
Product development: Peripheral automation streamlines product development by incorporating real-time customer feedback and market needs into ideas and initiatives which can be executed and incorporated quickly. Internal process and performance data, aggregated and analyzed, can lead to product and process changes leading to significant cost and time savings.
Data aggregation and AI for plant reliability and maintenance: By collecting data from various sources and systems, manufacturing businesses gain comprehensive insights into their operations. This data-driven approach enables proactive decision-making and empowers businesses to implement predictive maintenance strategies using AI algorithms. By identifying potential equipment failures and scheduling maintenance before breakdowns occur, businesses can minimize downtime and reduce maintenance costs.
Peripheral automation leads manufacturing businesses to: Utilizing capacity efficiently: By better supply chain management, improving plant availability and managing resources better, peripheral automation can unlock the capacities for growth.
Innovation: Peripheral automation allows manufacturing businesses to gain relevant insights and visibility leading to relevant ideas and collaboration across the organization. It allows better investment allocation and faster project execution leading to better products that meet evolving customer demands and better processes.
Driving customer satisfaction: Peripheral automation enhances efficiency, reliability, and cost-effectiveness, delivering better value to end consumers. By meeting customer demands effectively and ensuring timely deliveries, businesses can drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term growth.
Peripheral automation unlocks new possibilities and can drive significant growth. Via efficiencies, innovation and customer satisfaction, as detailed above, manufacturing businesses can achieve significant growth.
(The writer is Founder & CEO Advaiya Solution)
