The world has been witnessing recession for almost two years now. However, the condition in India is far better as compared to other parts of the world. Experts expect India’s GDP to grow at a decent rate of 7 percent, which is again a good sign for restructuring. The investment friendly policies of a stable government at the same time are encouraging manufacturing companies to increase capital spending, augment capacities to meet growing demand and improve the productivity of their existing manufacturing operations. In the last two years, certain sectors in India such as automotive and textiles have seen a downturn. But at the same time, the consumer industry comprising food and beverage, packaging and pharma has seen an impressive growth.



The industrial automation market is usually the last to be impacted by any drastic changes.Hence, it is not surprising that this market has remained unaffected until recently. However, we also need to consider the backlog in execution of orders with automation suppliers and solution providers, which greatly helped them tide over the last six to eight months.The growth rate in booking orders suffered but not the growth of the industry. The good news though is that manufacturers did not shelve projects; some deferred execution and many sought renegotiation of the orders and leveraged the downturn to obtain better prices from suppliers and solution providers.

“Capital expenditure on automation by process industries has not greatly suffered, while in the case of discrete industries there have been postponements.” SR Venkatapathy, Head of Research, India, ARC

“The present installed capacity of 150 GW is likely to be doubled by 2012, involving an investment of close to $300 billion in the power sector. Metals and mining is another high growth industry in India. The improved quality of healthcare in rural and urban regions has led to growth in the pharmaceutical industry.” Pankaj Verma, Director, Dynamic Engineers

SR Venkatapathy, Head of Research, India, ARC Advisory Group, says, “According to ARC, capital expenditure on automation by process industries has not greatly suffered, while in the case of discrete industries there have been postponements. It would be more appropriate to replace the term ‘downturn’ by the term ‘moderation in growth’ while referring to the automation market.” The market in India is domestic-oriented, which helps in its quicker recovery. Signs of a recovery are already evident. However, segments of market which are export oriented will recover with the global recovery timelines.

The outlook for process industries, such as electric power, metals, oil and gas and refineries, is buoyant. Domestic consumption of oil in India is escalating, and India’s refining capacity, which nearly doubled in the last six years, is growing. Pankaj Verma, Director, Dynamic Engineers, says, “The wide gap between the country’s power demand and generation is leading to investments in the electric power industry. The present installed capacity of 150 GW is likely to be doubled by 2012, involving an investment of close to $300 billion in the power sector.Metals and mining is another high growth industry in India. The improved quality of healthcare in rural and urban regions has led to growth in the pharmaceutical industry as well.”He further adds that this growth will in turn lead to a CAGR in surplus of 20 percent in the automation market. The total shipments, which were about $200 million in 2009, are expected to touch $350 million. Experts say that the growth in process industries and discrete industries should be analysed separately. This is because process industries involve longer cycles and numerous grassroot projects besides large scale brownfield expansion programmes, which are continuous projects and will not be greatly affected. Modernisation and expansion programmes, particularly on the automation front, have not suffered to a large extent.



This is mainly because productivity improvements are a focus area for all manufacturers across verticals since they provide a satisfactory RoI, and investments are visible even with respect to revenue expenditure. Globally, India’s economy is ranked fairly high, and its position is expected to improve with further impetus in the coming quarters.

Dr Ganesh Devaraj, MD and CEO, Soliton Technologies, says, “In discrete manufacturing industries, there is a strong incentive to use manual labour for many operations because of the low labour cost. So the cost benefit analysis will favour manual operations in a factory in India in comparison with a factory located in a developed economy.” Although this stands true for few Indian industrial business, we are well aware of the challenges involved in achieving high quality levels with manual operations. Therefore, in India,many companies are now looking for an optimal mix of automation with manual operations based on a cost-benefit analysis and the available capital for investment.

A clear choice
Due to the strict quality standards in many industries, automation is clearly the choice for operations that are critical to quality, and to reduce undue dependence on highly skilled operators. Interestingly, despite India’s huge population, manufacturers are facing a shortage of skilled labour, and this is prompting increased levels of automation. Companies in the automotive, pharmaceutical and other manufacturing industries are showing a keen interest in machine vision-based automation. Besides their internal quality initiatives, the adoption of machine vision is being driven by customer demands for very high quality in the automotive industry and tougher regulations in the pharmaceutical industry. The machine vision systems and smart cameras being deployed in Indian factories are on par with global standards in terms of cutting-edge technology.



Jitendra Chandulal Jain, MD and CEO, Neev Group of Companies, says, “The construction technology adopted by the infrastructure services sector today has provided returns on its huge initial investment. Projects are being completed at half the time taken previouly. For instance, a two-year project can now easily be completed in a year. This helps the investor to recover his investment faster, thus saving on huge interest cost. The construction industry was initially labour-oriented”.

However, with the advancement in technology, the manpower requirement for projects have reduced by 30-40 percent. Some examples of technology and methodology are RMC, concrete pumping machine, crane tower, placer booms, reinforcementmaking machines, plastering technology, micro-tunnelling machines (boring lining), pre-cast methodology, etc.

Evolution of e-automation
Business is undergoing a change with the Internet being used for the procurement of products. With its ability to systemise transactions, eautomation is increasingly being viewed as a key driver of the manufacturing industry. An industry-wide best practice that has been established since the days of Henry Ford is standardisation and mass production of most components and goods. However, there is also a high-value market that requires customised production. However, manufacturers today are struggling to achieve standardisation of products while simultaneously offering mass customisation for specific business needs.

This is because traditional engineer-to-order (ETO) solutions face tremendous challenges such as long lead times, investment of engineering bandwidth in the sales process and the need for greater transparency and clarity in giving the customer exactly what he wants. Senthilkumar Deivasigamany, Vice-President and Senior Partner-Operations, Barry-Wehmiller International Resources (BWIR), says,“e-automation or ETO as it is more commonly known, began as a basic evolution of existing engineering practices. When a potential customer presented a requirement, the sales team typically needed assistance from the engineering team to draft a quote, a process that would be protracted and take up a lot of the engineers’ time. This would end up being even more tedious and time consuming if the client made changes and edits on the fly.”

Gradually, this model gained acceptance among the masses and shifted into a set of pre-configured models. Although ETO companies welcomed this model, it did not receive a similar response from customers, who felt restricted by pre-made models and lack of indepth customisation. At this stage, the Internet started to revolutionise businesses, and organisations felt a need to go beyond traditional ETO. Today, ETO companies are trying to accomplish the following tasks to enhance their businesses:

• Implement a customer-centric business strategy that integrates all stakeholders
• Minimise the engineering intervention in the sales process, resulting in an increase in the
  number of bids, thereby improving the success rate
• Enhance engineering productivity through automation
• Reduce the quote-to-cash cycle through standardised order processing
  

Previous ETO solutions led to the twin challenges of delivering a high level of customisation and innovation in product development as well as maintaining significant manufacturing process efficiencies and cost optimisation. Today, there are solutions on the market such as C2O that deliver the next level of ETO solutions for manufacturing. It allows the manufacturer or the customer to select a base product and configure all the variable parameters associated with that
product in a rule-based manner, thereby freeing up valuable engineering bandwidth for core R&D activities and also reducing sales effort and delays significantly.

Impact on the Indian manufacturing sector
While developed nations are moving towards fully automated plants, Indian manufacturers are opting for a hybrid model by targeting their automation initiatives at critical stages to ensure quality. Low-cost automation is the preferred path to automation, where standardised components are brought together to build automation systems using in-house engineers. Smart cameras are one of the key standardised automation components used to ensure defect free products.

The Indian industry is exploring innovative ways of introducing automation at the right places to increase their global competitiveness. This trend will continue and increasingly novel automation systems will be developed in India in order to obtain competitive advantage from our low-cost labour and the ability to design and develop affordable automation systems. Automation levels are also satisfactory in industries such as oil and gas, refinery, petrochemicals and sections of chemical industries. B Badarinath, Senior Analyst, ARC Advisory Group, says, “In case of metals and mining, pulp and paper, water and wastewater, pharmaceuticals and food and beverage industries, the automation level still needs to catch up. Despite this, there are islands of excellence even in these industries with respect to the levels of automation and best practices”.

In the case of electric power, NTPC, the largest producer of power, has plants with plant load factor (PLF) percentages in the 90s and renovation/ modernisation programmes are being planned over the next decade. Aerospace and defence-related sectors, with ‘offset’ policies in place, are bound to see technology upgrades in the coming years. Safety in plants will also draw greater attention and focus.

Most importantly, business transformation through productivity improvements, quality enhancements and safety will gain importance in the coming years. Automation that underpins such efforts is bound to grow in the future as Indian companies go global with their produce.

Automation has provided the Indian manufacturing industry with a competitive edge, world-class quality and consistency. It has also improved throughput and allowed companies to meet global standards. India, which was mainly known for its information technology services, is now being recognised as the manufacturing hub for several global manufacturing majors in the industry also. Indian machine manufacturers have now begun exporting their machines to Europe and America and do not restrict themselves to exporting to developing countries anymore.

Manufacturers and OEMs understand the challenge associated with doing business in these tough economic times, and they need to enhance their operations as well as reduce costs. Automation has allowed manufacturers in India to improve operations through seamless production control and information systems that reduce implementation costs, save on integration costs and provide data that allows maximum uptime and flexibility.

In fact, the energy management solutions offered by automation companies can help in lowering energy costs.This is specially helpful as with growing interest in sustainable manufacturing, major manufacturing companies are working to reduce energy costs and waste as well as carry out their
operations in safer environments.

Top industrial tools (technologies)

• Field device tool (FDT): This technology developed by the FDT Consortium is internationally standardised and is an open environment specification for device management. It enables management of devices from multiple vendors in a single tool with unified procedures. Moreover, it allows vendors to implement the most advanced device features within the standardised framework.
  
• OPC Unified Architecture (UA): This technology developed by the OPC Foundation is an open and widely accepted toolset for industrial connectivity.
  
• Web service software system: The system as defined by W3C, supports interoperable machine-tomachine interaction over the network. It is the leading way for interaction over the Internet. It also utilises and automates the use of services from remote servers.
  
• Model predictive control (MPC): This provides advanced control methods. It is the most widely used advanced methodology for controlling processes with complex multivariable interdependencies.
  
• Ethernet: This is the physical layer for industrial communication at all levels of the hierarchy. It extends from the enterprise and plant level to the device level. It maximises the interconnectivity of different levels and provides the most competitive cost due to its
  high component volumes.
  
• Open source software: It is a base for continuous tool development. This movement has
  an impact on all aspects of tools and technologies. Open source ideology is crucial for the
  continuous development of open tool platforms.
  

Changing ideologies
A community is a group of people who share the same goal. In the automation industry, operators, maintenance staff, process developers and the production staff, all share the same goal: production results. Communities are the best way to work in the Internet world of today. The concept of communities is also extending and becoming increasingly popular in manufacturing industries. For example, in the case of the Linux operating system, when the computing community adopted the system as its own, it became a world-class operating system, developed by a community of people who shared information.

• One system platform for all
  According to this approach, one system handles maximal scope control, information management, asset management and business system integration. It has task-oriented user interfaces, which are tailored to the needs of different users.
  
• Wireless
  Here, relevant parts of the communication infrastructure will be wireless. ‘Relevant’ refers to the parts where using wireless devices adds value or enables solutions that were not possible before.|
  
• Community approach
  Automation enable users in the field, in control rooms, in the office, in a partner network to act as a community that continuously shares know-how, best practices, solves common problems and develops process and common practices in real time.
  
• From real-time control to realtime business control
  Field and enterprise level communication and control will be so well integrated that business
  decisions can be made from semireal-time to true real-time with immediate response in the process level actions. In general, the maximisation of energy efficiency and minimisation of environmental emissions are the leading requirements that have their impact on all business decisions in the automation industry.
  

In conclusion
Every industry in the world of industrialisation is driving its workforce to produce the maximum in less time. This has given birth to the idea of reducing the production turn-around time, and this in turn has created the need for industrial automation. The concept has provided relief to factory owners by reducing human intervention and controlling industrial machinery and process.

Control systems such as numerical control, programmable logic control and other industrial control systems work hands-on with other information technology applications like CAD and CAM. This advanced technology can be considered as a step beyond mechanisation, as it reduces the effort of human operators.

Therefore, the task ahead for automation—creating complex systems for a rapidly expanding range of applications and human activities—appears quite challenging. However, its before long that we will know what the future holds for us. Like John Tudor says—Pessimists have already begun to worry about what is going to replace automation!