The Next Industrial Revolution: How Future–Ready is India's Process Industry ?

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Elaborating on the benefits, Sivaram added, “Self diagnosing and maintaining machines would be reality in Industry 4.0. We need to rethink today’s maintenance strategy and move away from a reactive one to a condition based as well as predictive maintenance one. This will reduce the operational cost by reducing shut downs, minimizing inventory and unnecessary repairs.

In the case of the failure of particular equipment, other connected equipment will help to reduce the wastage by adjusting the intake of the raw material autonomously. Another contribution would be in terms of providing a safe environment for not only equipment but also humans, minimizing risk to these valuable assets.”

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How to Start: Adapting Industry 4.0

Head – Solutions Group, Endress+Hauser India, Hemal Desai feels that the first step of adapting Industry 4.0 principles is digitalization of production processes, which has already begun. “More and more data is being integrated in operational processes, across all levels of a company.

Vertically, this integration extends from the field device in production up to the ERP system (Enterprise Resource Planning, e.g., SAP). Horizontally, it passes through the entire value creation chain from the primary supplier to the end customer, and for engineering, data is linked together from the first planning phase for plants and their networking through to shutdown,” he added.

Meeting new Challenges

Any transformation involves challenges and risks. Industry 4.0 too is not an exception to the rule. Speaking on the same lines, Sivaram said, “The foremost challenge faced by the process industry is the difficulty in getting answers to topics such as return-on-investment, where should I start from, when is the good time to embark on the project. What is exceptional is that the answers to these questions are somewhat unique for each individual.”

Seconding the same, Milan Desai noted, “The question that needs to be answered today is how to implement and operate a production system—possibly even on a global scale—in a profitable manner while, at the same time, ensuring an output quantity in line with demand and maintaining consistent high quality, maximum customeroriented product variance, as well as easy adaptability.”

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