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64 SMT Magazine • December 2015 "In order to design and deliver such ad- vanced services, industrial suppliers are re- quired to forge partnerships with cloud and data analytics vendors. In some end use cases, even the most rudimentary solutions built on an integrated analytics package have enabled suppliers' upsell and increase product prices by up to 10%. It also helped achieve differentia- tion in a technology saturated market place," notes Muthukumar Viswanathan, practice di- rector for industrial automation & process con- trol and measurement & instrumentation at Frost & Sullivan. Major structural revisions are also expected on the shop floor driven by the advent of M2M (machine-to-machine) communication. By 2020, nearly 12 billion devices in the industry are poised to be connected via advanced M2M technology. Advent of Digital Factories The concept of a "digital factory" remains something that industry players continue to grapple with. What it really represents is a com- plete digitalization of the whole value chain, al- lowing for the use of digital models, methods, DIGITALIZATIon on THe HorIZon ArTiCle The emerging asia economies' manufactur- ing industry are fertile markets for factory and process automation. There remains a lot more room for automation to be adopted or upgraded in factories. Technology progression offers man- ufacturers more and more viable alternatives to improve and gain a competitive edge. Smart manufacturing is one of them. Smart manufacturing What smart manufacturing represents is the industrial internet of smart, connected factories and production plants. it enables integration and data sharing within the organization whereas normally, in a typical manufacturing plant, each process is a separate working entity. There are two main elements of smart manu- facturing that are captured in many of the au- tomation solutions provided by global vendors. The first is a manufacturing execution system (MES) that monitors and manages work-in-prog- ress on the factory floor. it can capture all manu- facturing information in real time, even across different geographical locations. The second is the merging of the product and production lifecycle where the entire pro- cess, from inception to engineering design and assembly, is integrated and captured in the form of a common data model. This enables business- es to make unified, information-backed decisions at every stage of the product lifecycle. Greater Productivity and efficiency The factory's productivity is sometimes ham- pered by the lack of information needed to ex- ecute decisions and optimize processes. This is especially so when global companies have mul- tiple factories based in different countries. MES gives manufacturers and employees real-time visibility of the factory's floor data, allowing for faster information flows and better control and synchronization of resources. fact-based deci- sions can be made more quickly and equipment malfunctions can be instantly detected. aside from being more productive, merg- ing the product and production lifecycle also increases resource efficiency. Consolidating the data captures learning points and best practices at each stage of the product lifecycle, enabling for tried-and-tested resource allocation methods to be employed. potential hiccups are minimized and consequently, fewer resources are wasted. Technological Advancement Along with the rise and fall of consumer de- mands comes the need to adapt accordingly. not only is expanding production capacity by em- ploying more workers or building bigger facto- ries important in meeting the growing demands, but also ensuring the processes are streamlined and integrated through smart manufacturing. This will contribute towards the factory's overall productivity and efficiency in the long run. A new era of Manufacturing