Start small to make it big in smart manufacturing

IT'S been almost a year since the launch of the Singapore government's Manufacturing 2030 vision to grow the sector by 50 per cent.

The manufacturing sector accounts for more than a fifth of the country's gross domestic product and employs about 450,000 people. For an island-state with limited resources, any target to grow by half in under nine years is a challenging one.

But deploying smart manufacturing does not mean you need make drastic changes at once, at least not right away. Nor should firms see this challenge exclusively as a question of technological capability.

Manufacturers should look instead to reskill their workforce, recognise the power of their data, and automate production to deliver on their own vision for 2030.

For Singapore, its manufacturing sector, and all those who work in it, the 2030 challenge is not as daunting as it may seem.

A Deloitte report titled The future of work is now: Is APAC ready? looked at the readiness of 12 major economies in the Asia-Pacific region, and found that Singapore's manufacturing firms are the best prepared to make this leap.

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Singapore's highly educated workforce, lifelong learning programmes, and strong social welfare measures put the country in a strong position to benefit from this transformation.

This is a journey that should be led by investment in retraining and talent.

Through a combination of university partnerships, internal learning and targeted training, firms can upskill their workforce and move them up and across the career ladder into more specialised roles or newly-needed roles.

Harness the power of data

As firms begin to invest in their people, they should also harness the power of their data. Every manufacturer is data-driven but not every company uses data effectively.

Even now, manual data capture still exists across large swathes of the sector. Numbers are compiled into spreadsheets, pulled from cell to cell, or jotted down on paper forms.

This is a costly, time consuming and disproportionate amount of employee time and effort to spend on data management, and it prevents workers from gathering insights that would provide value-add.

For instance, if a planner spends 80 per cent of his time pulling data and entering that data into Excel, it leaves only 20 per cent of time for data analysis.

The question is, can firms flip this 80:20 ratio in their favour? Data-based insights are essential to freeing manufacturers so they can respond quickly to challenges and opportunities within the business.

With 80 per cent of planning time spent gathering operational insights, manufacturers can look ahead and move closer towards achieving their operational goals.

Applying insights empowers the workers on the floor to find quick wins to make traditional processes more efficient.

One of the main issues in manufacturing is downtime. Generally, firms use a number of different manual techniques to prevent unplanned production downtime.

Machine jams, part failures, water or oil leaks can occur at any moment. It's estimated that just one minute of downtime in the automotive sector, for example, can cost up to US$22,000.

This downtime can last an average of anywhere up to four hours and if no one is there to see the problem occur, it can take even longer to solve.

A new machine is expensive, but an upskilled technician or engineer can find innovative ways to solve problems. Incremental solutions record machine operating in real-time, so that issues can be played back and resolved.

Start small

In our conversations with manufacturers, we tell them the story of how HP Singapore was able to implement Advanced Manufacturing step by step.

What came first was a plan to improve our operations, to identify where we could add value, and what we found was that it called for a completely different perspective of how we empower our employees.

A few years ago, the printhead manufacturing plant at HP Singapore relied to a large extent on manual operations, which meant that many areas of production were labour intensive and reactive.

Our first step was to go back to the fundamentals, to consider what we wanted the future of the organisation to be and then to think about how the technology could be deployed to achieve this.

We followed a strategy that pursued incremental progress.

First, we set out to drive culture change as well as build hard and soft skills. Our teams experimented with these technologies and then deployed them into our manufacturing lines.

Then, we leveraged Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies like Big Data, additive manufacturing, robotics and artificial intelligence.

The printhead manufacturing line is now highly digitised and automated, and we have increased productivity by 70 per cent while decreasing costs by 20 per cent.

It has taken time and effort, but we started with the fundamentals and levelled up, reskilling our employees because our workers were essential to building a new mindset for how our operations should be run.

As firms consider their next steps to becoming smart manufacturers, they should look at this challenge from the ground up and take a holistic approach.

Investment in reskilling is the best route to start encouraging a knowledge transformation across the company. A gradual investment in smart technologies will provide the tools to put this knowledge to work.

• The writer is managing director for Greater Asia at HP Inc.