Fighting recession with manufacturing data and digital services
The COVID-19 crisis shows the full potential of remote operations for the resilience management of businesses
Co-Authors: Daniel Trauth, Felix Mönckemeyer, Kristof Herrmann
Dieser Artikel ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar.
The Big Picture
For millions of people around the world the current spread of COVID-19 has changed everyday working nowadays, since home office is not anymore just an option for a few digitized businesses, but reality for many more people across all industries and countries. Nobody knows for how long this unprecedented situation will remain as we head towards unpredictable times. More than ever this calls for methods that help companies across all industries to cope with situations like this in order to keep its business going.
For tech businesses the step towards remote working is a small one compared to the struggles that industrial companies for example in manufacturing automotive and aerospace face. There, heavy machines are operated and the prospect of home office seems to be unimaginable. But also for those kind of companies there are methods that help reduce the impact of such scenarios on those companies such as remote operating. This not only applies to manufacturing but for many other sectors as well.
For instance the Charité Berlin and BARMER have agreed on a cooperation for a telemedical surveillance system of heart-disease patients that supports doctors and nurses in the 24/7-supervision of their patients, where patient data is taken by themselves and then sent directly to the hospital, reducing the physical interaction between doctors and patients [BMWi1]. Another possible use case of remote operation is outlined by Huawei and Deloitte in utilizing 5G-technology ready thermographic cameras that allow a live but also remote surveillance of public areas combined with an automatic alarm system [5GNRW1].
So the current situation with COVID-19 makes it imminent to businesses around the world to check how resistant their business system presents itself in a scenario, where employees can no longer work in their normal workplace and they have to find the right measures to steel their business for those kind of situations. This directly relates to a certain aspect of resilience management that any company needs in order to stand out in times like these.
What is resilience management?
In general, resilience management of a business describes all the measures that are taken to strengthen the resistance of the business system when encountering disruptions as well as offering post-disaster strategies to return the system to a status prior to the conflicting situation. Furthermore the resilience of a business is mainly measured by how well workflows can be upheld [TT1].
Now, for every company the portfolio of negative influences is quite different, which makes it hard to define a universal resilience strategy that can be applied to any business. For example, a company that uses personal data of their customers has to ensure the security of their data against theft, whilst a company in a physical industry aims to prevent supply chain interruptions.
Since the view on resilience management comes from the perspective of a situation where workers are forced to stay at home, not being able to attend their workplaces, we will illuminate a way to implement remote working for businesses that use machines, such as production processes, and therefore lack the flexibility of the employees to just work from home.
Remote manufacturing as solution
In order to deploy remote operation technologies in economies with machine usage, the data infrastructure needs to be implemented and the machines have to be digitized, as to say all relevant data has to be provided in a digitally accessible form. Only when the machines manufacture their data and feed them to a digital system in real-time, remote manufacturing can cover all desired operations from monitoring to actually steering the machines from distance as well as gaining insights from the data for monetization.
A system that enables quick and reliable data exchange in a secure environment is the key to tackling remote manufacturing, such as the senseering MyDataEconomy. Partly inspired by the SPAICER initiative which is supported by the Federal Ministry for Economical Affairs and Energy in Germany (BMWi), the platform provides an easily adaptable data exchange environment for the remote operation of machine systems of all sizes. Control dashboards can be customized to meet individual needs and optimize your resilience management accordingly. Additionally, the remote accessibility usually also simplifies the operation itself, as several processes or the interaction of multiple machines could be centralized or monitored together. In a way, the MyDataEconomy provides a digital version of the network of machines just for their data. Every machine has a digital twin which controls all data related aspects of the machine, such as sensor data or operational configurations.
Furthermore, the collection of data from every single machine in the system enables much more than just operating the machines from distance. The collected data from all machines is now available for analysis by powerful data science tools in order to generate insights and knowledge over the machine processes, which allows a more efficient use.
This all leads not only to the robustness of the system against the absence of workers, but also the effectiveness of the machines will be increased, leading to an overall more resilient system and a minimization of process interruptions. In other words, the deployment of remote operation is the crucial step for a company to achieve resilience against a crisis such as the spread of COVID-19.
For more information on resilience management and remote operations have a look at https://medium.com/spaicer-resilient-manufacturing/manufacturing-resilience-e5cfc437d12 or read more about MyDataEconomy on our website www.senseering.de. More information can also be found on www.spaicer.de
Sources:
[5GNRW20: https://5g.nrw/5g-zur-pandemievorbeugung-und-behandlung/]
[TT14: https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/business-resilience]
