Engineering a Digital Transformation

Feb. 5, 2019
L&T Technology Services rolls out “Factory D.0,” a set of technology and engineering services designed to help manufacturers identify areas within the organization that will benefit the most from digitalization.

As manufacturers accept the fact that they must undergo a “digital transformation” if they want to stay in business for the long term, many are moving toward technology—like the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). But adopting technology just for technology sake doesn’t solve anything. You can’t slap a sensor onto an instrument and expect results.

The digital journey must be engineered. Enter L&T Technology Services (LTTS), an engineering services organization that has developed a portfolio of proprietary technologies designed to help clients accelerate implementations and realize the benefits of Industry 4.0.

Bundled under the moniker of Factory D.0, the company introduced its offerings during a press conference this week at ARC Industry Forum in Orlando. The point of the technology portfolio is to solve the major challenges manufacturers face by identifying the right use cases that will benefit the most from digitalization and deliver a return on investment.

“Factory D.0 is a set of solutions we’ve developed in collaboration with smart manufacturing,” said Narayanan Ramanathan, global head of digital engineering at L&T Technology Services. “Our customers are all doing digitalization in some form, but they haven’t figured out the right use case. It’s not aligned with their business goals.”

In an effort to solve that problem, Factory D.0 is a one-stop shop offering that includes wireless material tracking, machine vision-based quality inspection, digital twin, energy optimization, collaborative robotics, integrated 3D modeling and virtual reality, and more. Working with manufacturers across a variety of industry sectors, over the last year, LTTS have gone into organizations to do a benchmark analysis, understand each company’s digital maturity, conduct a gap analysis to understand the obstacles and areas of opportunity, and then built proof of concepts for particular application areas.

Some of the early results include: A wireless material tracking system at a global aerospace manufacturer that implemented RFID tags across the supply chain to track orders, market data and production schedules as part of an integrated database. In the first year, one production line had an annual savings of over $100,000 while productivity went up 30 percent and parts availability increased by 40 percent.

Separately, LTTS designed a quality inspection system for an organization that automated manual processes. The system resulted in an annual savings of $150,000 on one production line, an 8 percent productivity increase and lowering rejection rates by 20 percent. And, they did a digital twin of the factory floor at a confectionery plant that simulated parts from real-time data, providing the company with the ability to do “what if” scenarios to figure out inefficiencies in the plant. In the first year, the manufacturer had a savings of over $1 million with overall equipment effectiveness up by 13 percent.

LTTS overs a breadth of services as it continues to work closely with major manufacturers to unearth new digitalization use cases that unlock business value.

About the Author

Stephanie Neil | Editor-in-Chief, OEM Magazine

Stephanie Neil has been reporting on business and technology for over 25 years and was named Editor-in-Chief of OEM magazine in 2018. She began her journalism career as a beat reporter for eWeek, a technology newspaper, later joining Managing Automation, a monthly B2B manufacturing magazine, as senior editor. During that time, Neil was also a correspondent for The Boston Globe, covering local news. She joined PMMI Media Group in 2015 as a senior editor for Automation World and continues to write for both AW and OEM, covering manufacturing news, technology trends, and workforce issues.

Sponsored Recommendations

Why Go Beyond Traditional HMI/SCADA

Traditional HMI/SCADAs are being reinvented with today's growing dependence on mobile technology. Discover how AVEVA is implementing this software into your everyday devices to...

4 Reasons to move to a subscription model for your HMI/SCADA

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) gives you the technical and financial ability to respond to the changing market and provides efficient control across your entire enterprise—not just...

Is your HMI stuck in the stone age?

What happens when you adopt modern HMI solutions? Learn more about the future of operations control with these six modern HMI must-haves to help you turbocharge operator efficiency...