Watch: Javed Ahmad on what makes the Schneider Electric factory in Bengaluru ‘smart’

The industry 4.0 revolution led by Industrial IoT (industrial internet of things) is touted to become the game changer for India’s manufacturing challenges, which include the prevailing dependency on paper based processes and manual labour. 

In line with what has now come to be known as Industry 4.0 principles, French energy management and automation company Schneider Electric recently launched its second smart factory in India on the outskirts of Bengaluru.   

Read: Schneider Electric launches second smart factory in India

Riding on heavy digitisation and data based predictive maintenance, as opposed to reactive maintenance, the state-of-the-art factory is an example of the efficiencies that automation and IT (information technology) solutions can bring to manufacturing.

The Bengaluru factory is Schneider’s second in India -- the first one came up in Hyderabad -- and joins similar facilities in Mexico, China and the US. 

The new Bengaluru factory will manufacture industrial uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, along with variable speed drives that regulate the rotation speed of an electric motor. The factory has been spruced up with digital tools such as AR (augmented reality), advanced analytics, IoT enabled architectures and cloud based applications that give it an edge over traditional Schneider Electric factories.

Some of the advantages include a 10% reduction in the mean time to repair critical equipment, 95% elimination of paper work, 10% reduction in energy consumption and an overall industrial efficiency increase of 5%. The 5% may not sound like a lot but experts say that a 5% is a huge advantage for industrial processes.     

Schneider Electric’s smart factory solutions are built on the EcoStruxure architecture, which is an IoT platform that connects different machines, processes and crunches data to provide actionable insights.  

In an interview with TechCircle, Javed Ahmad, senior vice president, global supply chain, India, Middle East and Africa, at Schneider Electric, spoke about the features deployed within the Bengaluru facility that lend it the ‘smart factory’ tag.

Ahmad, who closely monitors the functioning of the facilities and the deployment of the smart solutions, also elaborated on the different areas of the factory where all of the solutions play a part to eventually showcase an industrial 4.0 factory.