The use of this site and the content contained therein is governed by the Terms of Use. When you use this site you acknowledge that you have read the Terms of Use and that you accept and will be bound by the terms hereof and such terms as may be modified from time to time.
All text, graphics, audio, design and other works on the site are the copyrighted works of nasscom unless otherwise indicated. All rights reserved.
Content on the site is for personal use only and may be downloaded provided the material is kept intact and there is no violation of the copyrights, trademarks, and other proprietary rights. Any alteration of the material or use of the material contained in the site for any other purpose is a violation of the copyright of nasscom and / or its affiliates or associates or of its third-party information providers. This material cannot be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted or distributed in any way for non-personal use without obtaining the prior permission from nasscom.
The nasscom Members login is for the reference of only registered nasscom Member Companies.
nasscom reserves the right to modify the terms of use of any service without any liability. nasscom reserves the right to take all measures necessary to prevent access to any service or termination of service if the terms of use are not complied with or are contravened or there is any violation of copyright, trademark or other proprietary right.
From time to time nasscom may supplement these terms of use with additional terms pertaining to specific content (additional terms). Such additional terms are hereby incorporated by reference into these Terms of Use.
Disclaimer
The Company information provided on the nasscom web site is as per data collected by companies. nasscom is not liable on the authenticity of such data.
nasscom has exercised due diligence in checking the correctness and authenticity of the information contained in the site, but nasscom or any of its affiliates or associates or employees shall not be in any way responsible for any loss or damage that may arise to any person from any inadvertent error in the information contained in this site. The information from or through this site is provided "as is" and all warranties express or implied of any kind, regarding any matter pertaining to any service or channel, including without limitation the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement are disclaimed. nasscom and its affiliates and associates shall not be liable, at any time, for any failure of performance, error, omission, interruption, deletion, defect, delay in operation or transmission, computer virus, communications line failure, theft or destruction or unauthorised access to, alteration of, or use of information contained on the site. No representations, warranties or guarantees whatsoever are made as to the accuracy, adequacy, reliability, completeness, suitability or applicability of the information to a particular situation.
nasscom or its affiliates or associates or its employees do not provide any judgments or warranty in respect of the authenticity or correctness of the content of other services or sites to which links are provided. A link to another service or site is not an endorsement of any products or services on such site or the site.
The content provided is for information purposes alone and does not substitute for specific advice whether investment, legal, taxation or otherwise. nasscom disclaims all liability for damages caused by use of content on the site.
All responsibility and liability for any damages caused by downloading of any data is disclaimed.
nasscom reserves the right to modify, suspend / cancel, or discontinue any or all sections, or service at any time without notice.
For any grievances under the Information Technology Act 2000, please get in touch with Grievance Officer, Mr. Anirban Mandal at data-query@nasscom.in.
Past few months have taught us several lessons around resilience, and new models of collaboration leading to innovation across many areas
I had the opportunity of reading the book “The Unicorn Project” last December. As I collect my thoughts for an outline for this blog, I felt it would be a great idea to reflect on how closely the analogies echo between agile manufacturing and software development considering some of the software we have toyed with over the past year as a part of managing our software as a service offering. In my mind, these endeavors carry very similar motivations and thus, wanted to share a bit of perspective from both areas.
Typically, manufacturing companies have expanded into multiple geographies to get the best advantage of raw/input materials and talent. Software houses operated in a similar manner- cluster around the supply of raw material and talent. The value of gain in efficiency and quality is great in manufacturing (we still hold in awe the kind of procedures used by certain manufacturers). It is quite similar in software too. And last but not the least, as the industry matures, we see a lot of effort and time being spent in areas such as continuous learning: it has been a very popular concept in IT that acknowledges change as a “constant”! IT continues to take inspiration from manufacturing here to continuously improve operations.
A few areas I’d like to draw as discussion points – (1) Proof of concept (2) Routing (3) Digital Twin / monitoring, and finally, (4) Continuous improvements
(1) Proof of Concept – For anyone in the IT world, it is a common scenario that before embarking on a real development initiative, a smaller scale proof of concept is carried out. Now, in the manufacturing world, the adoption of technologies like 3d printing have really made it possible to validate several characteristics of the end product on a smaller scale before really the journey to build the real thing!
Additive manufacturing plays a critical role in shrinking time to market, validating some of the key performance parameters with a better cost characteristic. It is not just the capabilities and spread of materials that can be used in additive manufacturing that is constantly improving, there is active work ongoing to define the standards that govern additive manufacturing processes.
There is a similarity between such a standard evolving to let’s say a standardization we make in the way our microservices are deployed. e.g. UML/CAD modeling. What we see is in quite a few instances, 3D printing allows compression of several steps and if the POC is a success, enables a manufacturer to create a new offering in a disruptive manner with a shorter time to market. There are several industries that are using 3D printing as an effective mechanism to manufacture/parts required in small batches leveraging 3d printing. One of the more innovative usage of 3D printing innovation was seen in the PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) face masks in recent times. Thus, enabling a supply chain disruption in a time of crisis.
(2) Routing forms, the basis of all planning activity: from scheduling to capacity balancing to assignment of material needs and any document/info exchange steps. There is a pretty strong parallel between the microservice design paradigm and its evolution in IT vs Routing optimization in manufacturing.
How do we build it? Who/what are our bottleneck resources? What kind of scheduling do we carry out when planning critical steps like an Acceptance validation/performance benchmarking step? When do we integrate with the next component? These are critical steps that bake in the success criteria of IT projects. In a similar manner, capabilities to support innovative ways of managing your routing: including simultaneous order groups and any order groups provides shopfloor supervisors with the capability to plan their workload and balancing of priorities in the most optimal manner. In the middle of all of this, if there is a next “higher” priority order, how best do we handle our production so the existing as well as “new” item can be manufactured and shipped in an optimal manner.
In the same manner as the microservice architecture allows independent teams to collaborate even through changes/upgrades/etc, so long as a contract binds them together, it has been quite a clear strategy for manufacturing customers to segregate the duties carried out in their ERP vs the shopfloor of every plant (the activities at this unit driven by an independent Manufacturing Execution system that enables the right autonomy to follow the priorities/contract coming in from ERP, but, at the same time, offer the right flexibility of operation on the shopfloor).
Through the past year, we have improved several of our microservices and the resilience baked into them by following the principles of “hexagonal” architecture and segregating the concerns of DB management to the individual services and promoting a culture of development against a contract.
Despite the best architecture patterns we followed, we found a need for several robust monitoring tools to really help run our solutions as a well running 24/7 operation.
Right from being able to identify the health of database instance to the micro service CPU/memory stats to our integration glue like Kafka/Redis and the patterns of load that create negative impact, having a good “Digital Twin” of our components has been a big differentiator.
(3) Monitoring – This is exactly what we see from our customers too. Having data from shopfloor available to monitor (and more importantly, make the right data driven decisions) is a critical enabler of higher availability and better quality.
From each device, we have several data points that are accessible: if the past was about visual interpretation of such attributes on the shopfloor, we see a future where such data can be further analyzed on a data lake in the cloud and help customers draw several inferences that were not possible when such information was analyzed in isolation. The basic tenet we felt gave us a good bang for the buck: measure what matters; act on data and constantly improve based on the measurement. The minute we have a “measurable” operation, the ongoing changes/tweaks turn much more objective. It may also be possible that we start off measuring an “incorrect” attribute. At such a point, it is important to change the baseline, so we start off on a continuous improvement curve.
Also, it is critical to invest in “small steps” that bring a beneficial transformation. In IT, these may lie in small architectural changes/design changes. In Manufacturing, these may be small scheduling/optimization changes. It is important to measure the value of these small changes and validate in a smaller cycle prior to embarking on transformative steps. Whether it is a change in the database sizing or query optimization: both contribute to the same overall goal of getting more done. However, it is important to check whether we are getting more done with “less”!
Digital transformation of shopfloor data allows perform such a scale of analysis and also validate best practices from across plants.
(4) Continuous improvements vs big-bang changes: in the past, transformations were expected to be big-bang changes with long gestation cycles and a typical waterfall model of adoption with an ominous, all-or-nothing kind of evolution model. As agility reaches the next level, we see a much stronger preference to adopt innovation/changes in bite sized chunks. Rather than change the entire manufacturing solution overnight, customers show a preference to adopt simpler enhancements that does not need a large workforce to implement.
This is exactly how our solutions have started to shape themselves too: enable hybrid adoption at a pace that is convenient for our customers. Safeguard critical changes with “feature toggles” that allow customers to continue with less disruptive solution usage for a certain time before bringing such changes to their end users.
It is not just about feature toggles; we see a lot of value in shaping our solutions to offer a more seamless adoption capability: on-premise components can work with the latest and greatest innovations on the cloud. Cloud works with multiple ever-changing components offered from ERP, etc. But the ability to consume these capabilities firmly in the hands of our customers. What is often underestimated is the need to “continuously learn” along with “continuously improve”. It is not reality that a central team can out-innovate the collective intelligence of every factory floor. Similarly, a central architecture team may not always be able to tackle with the nuances that follow every microservice. However, as each team (central architecture/individual team) start to continuously learn, the results can be dramatically better.
In essence: decentralization with the right rules is good – allows faster innovation as well as better end results in the form of quality. Continuous improvements in smaller sizes make it possible to adopt the latest innovations easier – also, tighter feedback cycles, enabling us to minimize waste. Digital twin: this is a game changer!
As I share this blog, I am quite glad to say, we enhanced our presence from 2 data centers to 4, changed the architecture of over 8 microservices and were able to improve our availability characteristic a few more decimal points than where we began from at the start of the year.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of SAP.
About Author KG Chandrsekhar is a Vice President with Digital Manufacturing at SAP Labs India. Follow on twitter: @kgc_tweet
That the contents of third-party articles/blogs published here on the website, and the interpretation of all information in the article/blogs such as data, maps, numbers, opinions etc. displayed in the article/blogs and views or the opinions expressed within the content are solely of the author's; and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of NASSCOM or its affiliates in any manner. NASSCOM does not take any liability w.r.t. content in any manner and will not be liable in any manner whatsoever for any kind of liability arising out of any act, error or omission. The contents of third-party article/blogs published, are provided solely as convenience; and the presence of these articles/blogs should not, under any circumstances, be considered as an endorsement of the contents by NASSCOM in any manner; and if you chose to access these articles/blogs , you do so at your own risk.
Below are some of the learnings from the discussion on “The New Face of Innovation: Distributed and Hyper Connected” from the NASSCOM Technology and Leadership Forum (NTLF) held in February 2022
The Covid pandemic has forced all sectors to adopt…
The year 2022 is going to be a revolutionary time for the events industry. The past few years witnessed the event sector transitioning into its new phase amidst the restrictions posed by the pandemic. From in-person events to virtual, and hybrid…
By its very nature, the construction industry has many variables. It thereby requires a high level of flexibility, so it has always been challenging to automate processes in construction. As a result, construction industry has been somewhat…
Real estate has been one of the most reluctant industries to adopt new technology and therefore has been a relatively late addition to the digital bandwagon. Covid 19 has forced a digital transformation in this industry as the need for social…
Today, contact centers are the backbone of the customer service industry. They have evolved in the last six decades as technology advanced. They started with the simple PBX systems in 60’s. The ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) feature was…
Post pandemic, businesses have undergone a transformation digitally and have become more data driven. Therefore, building autonomous, and intelligent platforms is expected to help them move ahead with optimal efficiency. With the increasing need to…
