Expleo shares three ways that digitalisation is helping manufacturing leaders to improve operational efficiency across the business.
To meet the needs of the future, the maritime industry must continue to embrace technological advancements and digitalisation, transform its workforce and actively seek opportunities for decarbonisation. Manufacturing leaders will play a central role in achieving the ambitious design-and-build plans in both naval and commercial shipping. However, they face a number of key challenges that risk impeding the operational efficiency of marine engineering.
Every hour lost across quality inspection, supply chain delays, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) can feel painful for manufacturing leaders, at a time when contracts are demanding faster production with lower budgets.
Here are three opportunities to make time work harder on your behalf.
1. Reduce the time it takes to conduct conformity audits of platforms
Conformity checks are vital, however the process of checking whether a manufactured vessel meets the design intent is highly complex — and very time consuming.
This lengthy timeframe owes much to the manual nature of the work. Moreover, mistakes are unavoidable when your teams are having to assure and ensure the operational capability and safe compliance of critical systems and components.
It doesn’t have to be that way. To improve accuracy and accelerate this process, manufacturing leaders need to modernise their approach. Leaders from across sectors are increasingly turning to automated visual inspections to spot defects on their production lines. Shifting away from manual to AI-based inspections can make a dramatic difference to their speed and accuracy.
Happily, the same technology can be used in the marine industry. For instance, a camera-based AI system can check platform compartments against their design intent. If a defect is identified, the system will automatically identify it for attention. Not only does this lead to a huge labour-saving benefit, catching defects early reduces the risk of costly corrections later in your production process.
Navigating success
Similar to marine, visual inspection is crucial to automotive manufacturing. Each vehicle needs checking to make sure it meets the specifications for the model, market, client and so on. We deployed an automated visual inspection system for an automotive firm that’s 98% accurate and reduced processing time by 83% from two minutes to just 20 seconds. Work is in progress to reduce this further to a target time of 10 seconds.
Combining our expertise in engineering and digital, we recommended more efficient algorithms to achieve the right balance between processing time and accuracy. Our method developed a more cost-effective solution, enabling the 2D image-based visual inspection techniques, powered by deep learning, so that faster image recognition is now to be implemented in 15 factories worldwide.
2. Make your supply chain more flexible and robust
In marine, the manufacturing supply chain is often stretched to breaking point. And if a supplier fails to deliver a part, or it turns up with a defect, a whole project can quickly become derailed — leading to spiralling costs and the need for reworked plans.
As a manufacturing leader, these disruptions can feel like a bolt out of the blue – and prove destabilising. In reality, there are ways to prepare for (rather than react to) any sudden issues that may result in a significant impact. But how?
Supply chain resilience is always built on a bedrock of data. By harnessing new digital tools, marine organisations can evaluate historic data, monitor real-time supply chain activity, and apply predictive analytics to improve demand forecasting. Instead of being blindsided, a data-driven approach empowers teams to identify issues and critical single points of failure ahead of time.
Adopting parallel supply chain strategies can help you further build resiliency. In times of disruption, they give you the flexibility to quickly source parts and components from alternate sources, providing a buffer to reduce the impact on production.
Navigating success
By implementing predictive analytics in their supply chain, we helped a major industrial firm in the defence sector to streamline their sourcing of vital semiconductors during the global shortage. Helping to reduce user error and instantly detect data quality issues that previously could take days to spot.
Thanks to a combination of smart data management and automation, delays in updating supply chain data due to user errors have been reduced by 75%. And while it could previously take days for data quality issues to be spotted, they can now be identified instantly.
3. Ensure that your PLM and ERP are integrated and fit for purpose
Given the vast costs and multi-year timescales of marine manufacturing, finding ways to keep projects running smoothly is paramount.
Your PLM and ERP systems are critical to this process. But ensuring they’re fully integrated, updated, and running optimally demands ongoing testing. The truth is manual testing can be labour-intensive, inefficient, and difficult to scale effectively.
New digital testing frameworks can streamline your entire PLM testing process. Combining automation with AI-driven analytics, they can help you eliminate the need for manual intervention, while also scaling up and significantly reducing testing time.
Digital testing solutions also give you the ability to conduct comprehensive regression testing and maintenance on critical systems — catching issues that might otherwise be missed when testing manually.
That’s why industrial manufacturers are rapidly embracing AI-infused automated software testing to improve quality, slash costs, and cut their test cycle times by more than half.
Navigating success
Siemens PLM Software is a leading global provider of software and services for 69,500 customers worldwide – with major releases every six months and patches applied even more frequently across a variety of operating systems and browsers.
We developed an automated regression testing solution that can conduct tens of thousands of test cases every quarter. Importantly, we can implement similar methods to help with PLM and ERP testing in the marine sector. Siemens PLM can expect year-on-year benefits from this approach, either of larger volume of automation or a reduction in cost for the same volume.
Time for partnership
There is a golden thread running through the solutions discussed in this article: How to use automation, data and digitalisation to significantly improve operational efficiency. By inviting Expleo experts into your team, you gain a blend of practical engineering experience, IT know-how and in-service support that results in valuable time saving and accuracy.
