A trio of gurus working with top UK industrial players cited breaking data silos, targeting deployments and sharing lessons between businesses among measures deemed important to push smart manufacturing forward during the Connected Britain event last week.

Speaking on a panel dedicated to the topic, Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre head of digital technology Aparajithan Sivanathan (pictured, left); Manufacturing Technology Centre associate director, digital engineering Nandini Chakravorti (pictured, centre); and WM5G MD Robert Franks (pictured, right) chewed-over some of the key challenges.

The importance of sharing lessons to push forward advanced technologies and the prospect of larger players leading the way were raised several times during the session, with Sivanathan noting they may have “slightly deeper pockets” and “longer sight of the future”.

“We need to start with large manufacturers,” Franks said. “We need large, leading brands to come in and take a leadership position on the demand side on some of these new technologies, because the price and complexity of these technologies is very, very high. Until we’ve got these large players on board, we can’t solve some of the problems and make the technology cheaper”.

He noted the importance of persuading sizeable organisations to take the risk as “there are significant risks and costs for them in early-stage adoption”.  

Chakravorti highlighted there is benefit to collaboration across players with the same lines of business to derive wider benefits for emerging technologies. “Industrial sectors, for example aerospace, construction and automotive really need to come together, because everyone has the same challenges, whether that’s a big organisation or a small organisation”.

“They’ve really got to share the lessons learned and I think the bigger players [should discuss] how they [are] getting through these really difficult challenges around technology, finance and people,” she added.

Infrastructure
Franks, who’s organisation promotes the benefits of 5G for industry, noted the prevalence of fixed infrastructure for many industrial players.

“From a connectivity perspective if new network technologies are required, and they’re not always required, then making the business case for that additional investment is very difficult sometimes, but really important,” he noted.

In terms of technology approaches, the expert backed a “het-net type of approach, things like 5G and private networks aren’t going to replace Wi-Fi and WAN, but in certain circumstances can complement it”.

Sivanathan noted within the connectivity domain “the cost of 5G is only the tip of the problem. There is the integration problem, that’s the hidden cost: it’s not an interesting factor for the vendors but it is an interesting thing for the business, because that’s a large cost”.

He added there is a benefit from starting at “smaller use cases and smaller models”.

Data issues
Among other key elements to address were access to data within organisations and through supply chains.

Information is already being produced by the bucket load across players of all sizes, a core asset for connected industry applications, though the panel highlighted having the ability to get to it and sort it is a different matter.

Chakravorti noted there is an issue around data access alongside information and knowledge silos within companies hampering progress, while Sivanathan pointed to potential issues gathering information and getting complete visibility of supply chains.

Sivanathan noted for businesses with a larger supply chain there could be problems with “what format data is being exchanged, can both ends understand the same format, are we losing any information in the middle, is our connection high bandwidth enough, are we getting the data when we want it, are we seeing through the supply chain enough”?

“Maybe you can only see the first supplier you can’t see the whole chain,” he added.