The Introduction:

Operating in more than 3 continents in the area of Industrial automation, this client owns an electro mechanical company having large manufacturing setups. Overall, they have a strength of nearly 1200 employees across four geographically different facilities. Having a team of dedicated professionals, they aim to mobilize asset track and staying at par with market trends.

Key Stats

With nearly every industry drifting towards automated solutions, the manufacturing industry to has crossed paths with industrial robots and automated tools to stay at par with the current trends and technologies. Voicing the above, three statistics you should give a thought to are:

• The global market size of automation in the manufacturing industry has increased to $ 156.2 billion.
• A total of 121k units of industrial robots have been installed in the electronic and manufacturing industry across the globe.
• Total of 2.3 million automation units deployed in the current year.

The Problem Statement

Owing to the advent of digitization, traditional processes of management tend to be lean and slow. Machines outgrow and technologies lose their importance significantly. This additionally calls for the higher cost of maintenance, poor management, reduced efficiency and lowering organization productivity. Similar is the situation witnessed by our client.

With each passing day, the company finds it hard to meet the user’s demand. The absence of modern technology makes it difficult for engineers to track asset flow in real-time. This slows down the process of delivery. The company is facing a huge loss because of leveraged operation cost and reduced sales. As of now, functioning across the entire business is done manually. This requires specific personnel to spend hours lodging details of goods flow. Added to the above is the risk of data loss. The company now seeks integrating an automated web portal for the remote tracking and likewise management of the entire system.

Our Solution

The company emphasizes on technology is driven web portal. The Azure-based Asset Monitoring Web Portal is capable of delivering exactly what the company requires. Such a system would automate the entire workforce, add a virtual layer of security and also, optimize the process of asset tracking within the organization. Using the Azure Cloud technology, the development team has seamlessly streamlined the authentication process reducing the risk of data loss.

“For me, Stridely Solutions is my ‘One place to solve all my software problems’. I am totally impressed by the solution and look forward to creating a long term engagement with them.”

The Results

• Automation in asset management proven to reduce labour cost by £86, £800 in three years.
• Of the 749 billion working hours of labor, 478 billion is saved because of automated web API testing unit.
• Enhanced productivity within the organization.

Detailed Evaluation

The company was convinced that the traditional form of manufacturing units was no longer efficient. Where, at one end, manual tasks consumed considerable time, older management portals, on the other hand, were static and failed to automate the basic task. Asset tracking meant a person had to physically visit the warehouse and feed in the required details. Storing data in the conventional form heightened the risk of loss. Real-time tracking was more of a fiction and monitoring asset in adverse situations often imposed a threat to one’s life.

All of this made the company rethink its management strategy. In order to survive in the fast-paced competitive world, embracing innovation is the only way out. And so, the company now strives to revive its entire asset management system. The team approached us to help them redesign their existing management in a way that would counter the persisting challenges and emerge out as the optimal solution.

After comprehensively studying the entire scenario, we proposed a solution in terms of Asset Management Web Portal. To start with, the asset management web portal is a single page application that serves the request on the same page. Developing such a page help reduce the page load time, incurs the lesser cost and optimizes the overall functioning.

Next, the web portal has been fed with Token-Based Azure AD Authentication. The biggest threat in remote asset management is data security. Given the fact that business organizations always keep an eye on their competitor’s. They are always keen to know about the internal details of a company, primarily their assets and corresponding values. Such a situation is fatal as it could cost the company, its name, and market rank. With the technology is driven asset management web portal, we have added a later of security to prevent unauthorized access to the company’s internal data.

Token-based Azure AD Authentication necessitates every user to verify their identity by entering a pre-generated a token. This token is a form of a security key and known only to the people within the organization. So, even if intruders find their way inside the portal, they would not be granted access. All illegitimate access is denied thereby securing the vital data off the organization.

Additionally, the application keeps track of asset remotely in real-time. Each product is attributed with a tag that can further be traced through GPS in real-time. Such a method improves the efficiency of workflow within the company. Also, production head can easily trace missing goods, if any, with the help of such auto-generated tags. We have integrated several APIs to get hold of the serial number, time of dispatch, code and related information.

As an added advantage, such tags streamline the entire system maintaining consistency and improvising the workflow.

Future Prospects

Though a lot has been done to automate the process of asset management, there still exists room for improvement. One of the issues that still need to be resolved is the remote monitoring of machines. There are instances when machines are set up in adverse areas that could threaten human life. In the event of above, the company needs to have sensors installed within the equipment that is capable of assessing the machine all by itself.

As for example, these sensors can detect the temperature or the basic functioning of the equipment and if due to any reason, it detects rise/fall in temperature or any other defect, it automatically shuts the machine down preventing adverse outcomes. Such a system would not only enhance remote machine monitoring but is also beneficial for pieces of equipment that run 24/7. It would eliminate the need for manual labor to set and monitor the machine, instead be smart enough to do so, on its own.

In addition to the above, additional researches have been done to employ bots to do the above-said tasks. They would be designed in a way that they can sense irregular machine functioning and take up necessary steps to prevent further loss. True that there are millions of such bots employed in many industrial plants, however, a well-planned approach is yet to hit the manufacturing industry globally.