Achieving Manufacturing Agility through Dynamic ERP Solutions
#Dassault #DigitalTransformation #DELMIAworks #ERPMr. Ramakrishnan Venkatraman, Director & Head (Enterprise Solutions), Dassault Systemes, is an evangelist for enterprise solutions for the manufacturing industry at large. In an exclusive interview with Pro MFG Media, he touched upon the various aspects of harnessing the power of ERP and MES solutions.
In recent years, Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP technology has carved a niche for itself across industries. While it is comparatively easier for bigger organizations to adopt the ERP technology, the small and medium businesses (SMBs) often find it to be a challenge owing to various factors.
Brought under the Dassault Systemes' 3DEXPERIENCE Works portfolio in 2018, DELMIAworks is one of the leading providers of manufacturing software solutions and ERP systems. DELMIAworks provides manufacturers with an affordable system that improves the collaboration, manufacturing efficiency and business agility needed to serve their customers successfully. As an end-to-end ERP and MES software solution, it offers complete functionality to manufacturers in terms of business agility and customer satisfaction.
Having led various enterprise and channel sales teams across various scales and organizations in his career of over two decades, Mr. Ramakrishnan Venkatraman, Director & Head (Enterprise Solutions), Dassault Systemes, is an evangelist for enterprise solutions for the manufacturing industry at large.
In an exclusive interview with Pro MFG Media, Mr. Venkatraman touched upon the various aspects of harnessing the power of ERP and MES solutions across the manufacturing sector.
The Advent of ERP
Elaborating the ways SMBs across the globe are harnessing the power of ERP and MES integration, Mr. Venkatraman underlined that at a global level, the Enterprise Resource Planning(ERP) technology has been in the industry since two to three decades now. The ERP, as a solution, started from more of a process centric approach. That was the time when people were looking to automate some of the mundane processes. So that is the way, the whole concept of ERP started evolving 30 years back. Thereby, it added up due to the growth of all the technology and it has since been playing a bigger role in terms of developing this ERP into a full fledged enterprise solution.
He further emphasized that in the last two decades, the involvement of IT has transformed the traditional Material Requirement Planning(MRP) into a full-fledged business enterprise solution. Currently, the ERP run by many of those OEMs is not only talking about that traditional ERP, sales and distribution management or maybe inventory management but also the RP talks about much much beyond that. It talks about business intelligence, it talks about how to ensure if customer satisfaction is being monitored or product deliveries to the customers are happening in a limited timeframe, he added.
The 'Ownership' Effect
He further observed that the maturity level within the SMB is not at par yet, in terms of how the OEMs have adopted these type of technologies. In fact, there are multiple pivots for that. "One of the reasons SMBs have not adopted technologies as they should have is that most of them are owner centric to a great extent", he added. That means, it is the very mindset of the owners that drives the decisions. Given that most of the manufacturing company owners continue to possess a traditional mindset in terms of digitalization and technologies, the modernization aspect has long stayed out of pace.
Sharing his expert insights on DELMIAworks' approach in the direction of driving manufacturers to resource optimization and make manufacturing leaner, Mr. Ramakrishnan elaborated that the ideology that DELMIAworks strives to bring to the manufacturing world is to ensure that jobs aren't meant to cut off automation or vice versa. "We need to automate some of the tasks. Automating the task is a need of the work, not to condone the jobs. So, when we are talking about automation of the task, if you take any manufacturing operations, there will be multiple tasks involved in the manufacturing of a final product. DELMIAworks' solution will help the organization, especially the discrete manufacturing organization to automate these tasks. So that it helps the organizations to see where exactly my product manufacturing cycle is all about", he continued.
The Emerging Indian Market
Sharing his esteemed insights from an Indian context, he emphasized that India has widespread industry sectors across the tier 1 and tier 2 cities of the country. So, looking at some of those key spot areas of the industry verticals, DELMIAworks goes one step beyond this in terms of their manufacturing processes.
These manufacturing processes include metal injection and the plastic injection molding process. And that's a very big market, where the real time monitoring is very crucial for many of the manufacturers. So, the plastic injection molding manufacturing process is one particular manufacturing process which is going to have a bigger impact.
The second one is basically on metal cutting the machining process. The third area is the assembly, wherein majority of the auto competent manufacturers follow this assembly process where they source multiple levels of parts from multiple suppliers. They bring up all items into one place in the assembly shop floor and tag them with RFIDs and barcodes, followed by the complete assembly process. In fact, that's how we can ensure that the assembly happens at the right time and at the right place. So that is also another way of doing the manufacturing process, then the stamping process. When we look at all these manufacturing processes, it can go into the industries like that of automotives. The second one is the aerospace contract manufacturing areas. The third is on the life sciences which basically involves med tech devices.
Summing up his insights on the Indian market, Mr. Ramakrishnan highlighted that it is the food and beverages industry and the packaging industries, where most of the tasks are automated. "Hence, this industry is another sweet spot for DELMIAworks, and people can adapt to it much faster. So, these are the industries which DELMIAworks is currently looking at from the Indian context in order to help their manufacturing customers."
About Ramakrishnan Venkatraman
Having spent more than a decade in the organization across various functions, Mr. Ramakrishnan Venkatraman is currently the Director and Head of Enterprise Solutions at Dassault Systemes`. Mr. Venkatraman is a seasoned technology evangelist for Industry 4.0 for the manufacturing domain, he has more than 20 years of experience across various tech-based products and enterprise software solutions.
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