15 key components of modern production

15 technologies that need to be implemented by Russian plants as quickly as possible if they aim to outrun foreign enterprises in the competitiveness race of the fourth industrial revolution.



How can Russian manufacturers prepare for a new technological order? What exactly allows foreign companies to produce industrial equipment better, faster, cheaper?
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During the last 10 years, we, with a team, implementing large industrial projects, answered these questions, working in seven countries of the world (Great Britain, USA, Germany, Japan, Italy, Ukraine, Russia) at dozens of international engineering enterprises. Thanks to this work, we conducted a detailed analysis of approaches and technologies to ensure a high degree of competitiveness of a modern international manufacturing enterprise.

Here are 15 technologies that need to be implemented by Russian plants as quickly as possible if they want to catch up and overtake foreign enterprises in the competitiveness race of the fourth industrial revolution.

1. Enterprise Information Management Systems , Enterprise Information Management: EIM = PLM + MES + ERP. It is in this combination, with mutual data transfer, they have been working in international companies since the 90s of the last century, forming a centralized digital information hub used at all stages of the production project life cycle: for digital engineering, in the digital workshop, in the digital supply chain, logistics and digital adaptation to the consumer product for sales and service. Recently, as one of the important components of EIM, systems of the MDC class, the Manufacturing Data Collection of Russian manufacturers, are being actively developed, providing monitoring of the means of production with numerical program control and collecting data on the workload of machines. To accumulate, organize and manage information at all stages of the product life cycle today is still important for the gradual transition through machine learning to fully automatic production.


Today, new digital productions are created annually in Russia

2. Convergence of digital and physical in the developed product is already in the draft design - but first it is necessary to restore order in the storage of the design and technological documentation, having implemented component 1. Today, the leading manufacturers at the design stage of mechanical equipment think through and put into the design of the manufactured product secure industrial internet of things with digital control systems.

3. Systematization, accumulation and protection of intangible assets (IA) and intellectual property. Not necessarily in the form of patents, not necessarily in the form of production secrets and know-how. Do not forget to integrate IA in the company's business, recording their assessment in the balance sheet. Everything is simple here: one of the main beneficiaries of the fourth industrial revolution is the owner and supplier of intellectual capital. If you develop as a producer and do not register your intellectual property, you will deprive yourself of these benefits. Today, leading companies and states are struggling to build a competitive knowledge economy (economy economics) with a foundation in the form of producing intellectual products - technologies, patents, know-how. Providing integration in the economic activity of intangible assets, Russian companies can be global industrial giants, even without their own factories.

4. Digital reverse engineering [1]. As one of the most successful business strategies of the international expansion of a machine-building company, today the development of its own service center abroad has been confirmed in practice. The service base or repair facility is created next to the customer, the trained personnel of such a base helps to repair the consumer’s worn-out equipment by scanning parts and transfers the 3D models obtained as a result of the scan to their home enterprise for production. As a result, the PDM systems database of international global manufacturers are filled with existing product formulations and operating equipment configurations for the subsequent expansion of the production lines of these global companies.

5. Engineering Analysis (CAE) as a separate business area, virtual prototyping, numerical virtual experiment, FEA and CFD. Digital modeling of the equipment you manufacture also greatly affects the timing of product development and release. Various methods of modeling - from physical processes and individual assembly units to technological processes and production in general, are widely used in all leading manufacturing enterprises today, ensuring their industry leadership [2]. Tesla Vice President for Production spoke very well about this: “Modern production is an intelligent machine that produces other machines. You must collect all plant data. You need to understand the processes and how you can improve them. When you have enough information, it will be easy to simulate the whole enterprise from the beginning to the end and understand the key points of impact and plant settings ”[3].

6. Digital twins (complete information model) of the product being released, promotion and sales through virtual reality (VR) and service using augmented reality (AR). Visit the Caterpillar website. See the product line? To show how this equipment works, to present and sell it to the sheikhs, a CAT is no longer lucky with a grader in the UAE. CAT transmits the 3D model of the grader to its representative office and they show this model in a virtual reality glasses in VR to a potential buyer. Rate the savings on logistics. With the help of AR, CAT service engineers serving the same grader on the basis of a mathematical model with predictive analytics can perform “spot” repairs in full compliance with all instructions and the current state of the grader who requested the service. Assess the prospects of service as a business for CAT.

7. Energy efficiency of enterprises , their certification according to LEED, BREEAM standards and reduction of operating costs by 25% or more. This directly affects the cost of production of these enterprises and reduces the risks of the energy dependence of enterprises, the risks of changes in legislation, etc.

8. Technology transfer. If you have equipped your oil field with a complex of foreign industrial equipment, immediately start thinking about its production here. Not even that. Having planned the purchase of a significant amount of foreign equipment to equip your oil field, immediately plan and implement the transfer of technologies for the production of this equipment in Russia. Otherwise, during the operation of this equipment, you will quickly go broke on its service (from 100 euros per hour - the cost of a European engineer), and in five years you will find yourself the owner of obsolete trash. Moreover, your industry neighbors, purchasing similar equipment from the same company in five years, will become the owners of the machines five generations older and more efficient than yours, since updating the product line once a year is the real practice of a modern international machine builder. With the accelerated development of digital production technologies and the reduction of production time for TRANSFER TECHNOLOGIES, today has become the only survival opportunity not even for the manufacturer, but for the customer and the equipment operator. At the same time, enterprises that have formed the volume of intellectual assets in PDM systems may begin to think about their capitalization, including transfer (export) of technologies to developing countries and the sale of licenses for intangible assets (know-how and intellectual property).

9. Additive production for model testing and prototyping. Don't you have a 3D printer or a 3D printing studio partner? Then - see component 5 on digital modeling - you cannot be as fast in developing and releasing new products as international manufacturers.

10. Professional project management. To ensure the delivery of complex types of equipment on time, with a planned financial result and with the quality required by the customer, leading manufacturing enterprises create corporate project management systems, turning to best practices of modern project management and combining Agile and Waterfall approaches to project implementation.

11. Lean production (lean) in all its manifestations and order in the shops with the development and implementation of a strong production system. A huge number of workshops in Russia are non-compliant with environmental standards, untidy rooms with a chaotically worn tool on workbenches under a layer of chips. Does anyone really think that in such conditions it is possible to produce a competitive product? Optimization of the workshop layout, standardization of the production process, increase in the efficiency of the equipment are important components of the productivity growth of a modern plant.

12. The output of subsystems of the enterprise information management system (PDM, MES, MDC) to automated workplaces (AWP) of production sites. For 10 years, a generation has grown up for which the display is more familiar than a sheet of paper. Young fitters will work effectively with the digital interface of the product composition on the assembly work station using interactive electronic technical manuals. CNC machine operators effectively use digital assistants of the technological processes performed, which include knowledge bases of normative and reference information. Management of production processes, analysis of their bottlenecks and restrictions, making management decisions based on this analysis, the shop manager leads from the main control room, production control panel equipped with a display, which receives video signals from all production sites and information about their performance (for example, the “ Height 239 "ChTPZ).

13. Training production centers in your enterprise and the development of a fab lab in the region where the enterprise operates. Popularization of digital production through workshops with a story about the work of modern engineers, 3D printing, robotics. Participation of young shop floor specialists in WorldSkills, EuroSkills. The European enterprise, which opened a plant in Russia, has several such centers equipped with product samples for training staff and partners of the company.

14. Digital logistics management , including using RFID identification, with the control of the movement of raw materials and materials, is very important to ensure the competitiveness of production today. Maximum automation of inventory management, digital material selection systems with light indication (smart shelves, pick-by-light), when information on the material selection task is displayed on the shelf-integrated display, when connected to MES, on advanced productions with smart teams increase productivity by an order of magnitude with a proportional reduction in logistics costs [3].

15. Cross-industry cooperation , interaction with partners in professional associations, conducting an audit of the quality of other companies for the organization of technology partnerships.

Enhancing the exchange of resources, opportunities and needs, including through existing online tools. Using the platform effect when digital manufacturers create networks connecting sellers and buyers, increasing revenues through economies of scale [4]. An example is the cooperation of Hewlett-Packard, National Instruments, PTC and Flowserve [5, 6], which have teamed up to jointly produce pumping units that are managed and maintained using the technology of the industrial Internet of things and predictive analytics. The Russian example is the co-operation of Yandex Data Factory and the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant, which created a mathematical model of steel production using machine learning algorithms to optimize the consumption of ferroalloys and additional materials [7].

Why is it so important today to rely on these working production technologies in the competitiveness race of the fourth industrial revolution?

Let's look at what happened in recent years. In the product and in the means of production, radical digital-to-physical convergence has proven its effectiveness. In development - if an enterprise does not release a new product model annually in a fast and tight digital world, it loses to competitors. In production, the effective possibilities for unmanned production have increased, therefore shop personnel are gradually being replaced by digital technological process operators, as ten years ago, turners and millers began to be replaced by CNC machine operators. In the product service, the technologies of predictive analytics are being disseminated as a serious competitive force and connection of the product with its developer (see the example of Tesla). Yes, these technologies were born decades ago. But any revolution is the final destruction of the old technological platform by a critical mass of new technologies that have evolved over the years. It would be naive to assume that the industrial revolution occurs when a completely new technological platform in a moment changes the number 3 to 4. The best example of a revolutionary product obtained in an evolutionary way is Tesla and, if the technological novelty of this product (and its means of production) is projected onto other industries and products, it becomes clear that a change in the technological structure is really taking place.

The industrial revolution is happening through the transformation of the means of production and the product developed and produced by these tools. As a result - a cardinal increase in labor productivity, product release rate and its quality.

About any technology (IoT, AR, VR, Big Data) you can say "we did it 10, 20, 30 years ago." But not single practices create an industrial revolution, but the formation (including through sectoral cooperation, component 15, and educational initiatives, component 13) of a technology system that radically affects productivity, the speed of production and creates new types of economic activity. From this point of view, the snobbish position “these technologies are nothing new, only marketing names” has no effect on the onset of the new industrial revolution.

What needs to be done so that modern components of production systems and technology work in Russian industries?

We need to leave technological snobbery, learn from the experience of the development of eastern enterprises and their leaders, who absorb best international practices like a sponge. Search and work with such practitioners at conferences, forums, reference visits to leading production companies, in communication with engineering and production consultants. In the organizational structure of our enterprises, it is necessary to ensure close cooperation between IT and R & D units with joint development of new products and modernization of existing ones. Work with vendors and integrators of information systems, in turn, dynamically developing in sync with technologies and offering comprehensive solutions to automate the entire life cycle of products.