Sharada Prahladrao gives an overview of the key topics at ARC Advisory Group’s 15th India Forum
Rebecca Gibson |
Themed ‘Industry in Transition: Realizing the Digital Enterprise’ ARC Advisory Group's 15th India Forum for the process and discrete industries attracted close to 280 delegates when it took place in Bangalore, India from 6-7 July 2017.
Today, companies are digitising business processes and exploiting the increasing convergence between operational technology and IT on the plant floor. Governments around the world are supporting manufacturing growth initiatives, and these emerging business models allow manufacturers to collaborate more effectively. Intelligent connected products, along with network communications, software, and analytics now enable manufacturers to improve uptime and optimise operating performance. The digital enterprise benefits from smarter products, new service and operating models, new production techniques, and new approaches to design and sourcing. It is about becoming collaboratively networked enterprises, managing dispersed centres of technology, engineering, production, and resources.
Technology adoption has become imperative in today’s scenario, to drive down costs and improve quality and use of data. Automation is the key element in the technology adoption process. India's journey to achieve more than 15% growth in the manufacturing sector on a sustained basis requires a skillful adoption of automation technologies to raise productivity, consistency and effectively manage the complexities of varying business cycles.
To examine automation as a strategy for increasing productivity and reliability in manufacturing operation, one has to balance between the investment costs attributed to the implementation costs of knowledge-based engineering or engineering automation software and hardware, and the real-time benefits of automation in terms of payback. As technologies keep on evolving it is essential to keep on upgrading in terms of knowledge and skillsets – both for greenfield and brownfield projects.
The two-day ARC forum was structured to disseminate information and technology effectively and provide end users, solution providers and decision makers an opportunity to network and get an overall view of the market and its requirements.
The session topics at the forum were about moving towards the digital enterprise; automation trends and cybersecurity; evolving technology trends; and end user experiences on the digital journey. On both days there were two lively and thought provoking question and answer sessions with the speakers.
The success of our forum is largely due to the tremendous support we received from our sponsors, such as global sponsors Bentley Systems and Siemens, and industry association sponsors AIA, CIO Forum, and CSIA. The Record was one of 13 media sponsors.