To improve productivity within the UK manufacturing sector, businesses need better ways of managing data capacity and the flow of traffic travelling across their networks. Andrew Hunter (director, VINCI Energies UK & ROI) and Russell Crampin (director, Axians UK) explain.
It’s no secret that the UK has something of a productivity problem. Official figures show that UK productivity growth lags behind competitors such as Germany, the US, France and Italy.
Most recently, official figures showed a 0.2% productivity rise in the UK manufacturing sector for the first three months of 2017. However, the UK’s overall economy saw fall in productivity levels of 0.5%.
Recent editions of the Manufacturing Barometer show that the UK’s manufacturing sector recognises the need to improve productivity. Research from EEF suggests that manufacturing performs 69% of the UK’s overall business investment in R&D. And as ever, there’s a diverse set of opinions on what industry needs to do to boost its contribution to UK productivity.
In our experience, businesses wanting to improve productivity essentially have two challenges: upgrading equipment, and upgrading processes. So there’s a need to invest both in new technologies and in developing the ability to make best use of the advantages those technologies can offer.
Finding a route to improving productivity
Many manufacturers recognise that one route towards increasing productivity in both equipment and processes is to invest in digital innovations that allow an upgrade in approaches to monitoring, control and optimisation in the production line. Investment in modern machinery, improved automation and smart devices for employees can improve efficiency across a business.
Digital technology is expanding fast, and employees and third party businesses require access to an increasing range of connected devices, each consuming data on the network to help them improve business performance.
At VINCI Energies, we welcome this smarter, more connected environment as a way to improve productivity across manufacturers. But as we tell our customers every day, it’s vital to have an ICT infrastructure which is resilient enough to adapt and handle increased traffic that comes from a variety of devices and data-sources accessing the network.
Managing increased traffic in the network
This year’s Annual Manufacturing Report showed that most manufacturers take a pragmatic view of connectivity’s impact on productivity. The truth is that, depending on the way it’s implemented, better ICT networks can offer significant opportunities to bolster agility, flexibility, and productivity.
What’s certain is that for many companies, increased connectivity most likely means upgrading multiple elements of existing ICT infrastructure, including the underlying network that carries data between on- and off-site systems.
An employee today might come to work with a phone, laptop, tablet and smartwatch, quadrupling the amount of traffic travelling across their network.
Manufacturers often undertake point network upgrades as a low cost way to cope with this extra traffic. The problem is, much like patching or building new road network bypasses, you are just delaying an inevitable and significant congestion problem.
At that point, it becomes a question of how you can use existing routes more effectively. And just as motorways now use smart gantries to analyse the speed of traffic and change speed limits and lane allocation in real time to keep things moving, critical networks can be streamlined using solutions like software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) as a traffic management system.
This allows companies to direct data differently based on the information that data contains, and on how important it is, just as a motorway has multiple lanes which can allow faster cars to overtake slow moving freight and avoid delays that might otherwise come from road works and other obstacles.
By investing in improved ICT infrastructure, companies can see better returns on investment they make into upgrading their equipment, while implementing smarter processes that allow employees to concentrate on helping the business perform. And deploying these solutions is more cost-effective and less time-intensive than simply throwing more bandwidth at the problem.
The future of productivity in manufacturing
You can look at companies’ ICT networks as the glue which supports the increasing digitalisation we’re seeing across manufacturing.
EEF’s Productivity: state of the manufacturing nation report showed that acquiring systems which support connected machines and allow the capture and processing of large amounts of data will be more prominent in the investment decisions of manufacturers over the next five years.
While systems like AR, VR, 3D printing, robotics and IoT may push the boundaries of network performance in the near term, the ICT sector is a fluent and rapidly developing environment. Manufacturers’ networks must be sufficiently flexible to cope with increasing application and service demands for the next five to ten years.
Investing in upgrading networks will help manufacturers to improve their productivity and make best use of the new technologies and innovative solutions that are the future of the production line.
