Driven in large part by several government initiatives – like the Dubai Industrial Strategy 2030 – to transform from an oil-based to a knowledge-based economy, over the last few years, we have seen strong growth in the UAE industrial sector. In fact, accordingly to the UAE Ministry of Energy and Industry, the industrial sector contributes around 9.5 per cent to the country’s GDP, with a forecasted growth of 4.5 per cent in the last five years.

This growth has brought with it the inevitability of change. The evolving nature of products and customer engagement in the regional manufacturing sector is creating new industry segments and reinventing, sometimes even eliminating, others. In this ever-changing environment, manufacturers need to be aware of the risks of being left behind if they do not master emerging technologies.

But manufacturers need a compelling reason based on business gains and/or competitive pressures in their markets to make this change. Any shift in practices and processes has traditionally been slow, and expensive, with often disastrous results if not approached in the right way. So why should local companies start investing in, for example, ‘smart factory’ technologies now? The answer is to ensure future survival, and to capitalise on growth opportunities.

According to our own research, 50 per cent of survey respondents said they believe strongly that they have the tools to grow. But 29 per cent are unsure where that growth will come from. To help manufacturers follow the right path, and thrive in the Industry 4.0 era, let’s take a look at some of the areas that have high potential for growth.

GETTING PERSONAL

The need for instant gratification and personalisation is pushing product engineering and manufacturing to new levels of complexity. The customer is changing what they want from products, how they want to consume them and what relationship they have with the manufacturers who produce them. To maintain costs and product quality, Middle East manufacturers must increase their effectiveness by learning to combine factory automation with process flexibility. In the smart factory, processes need to go beyond automation and become autonomous. The smart factory deploys intelligent machines that will help make decisions in more flexible and unstructured ways.

FACTORY INTELLIGENCE

Many emerging technologies will be deployed to help create these enhanced capabilities. Artificial intelligence (AI) will develop so that it transforms our current understanding of product configuration, production scheduling, and real-time decision making for optimised profitability. Data generated from and shared with other smart machines turns into intelligence that ensures that manufacturing assets operate as a balanced system. The need for embedded analytics and manufacturing intelligence across your factory floor and beyond is a necessity for manufacturers trying to optimise and improve processes and productivity.

PRODUCT INNOVATION

The digitisation of the economy is also changing the nature of product development. Data will no longer be a by-product of the manufacturing process, but will deliver increasingly important insights both for the customer and manufacturer. Physical, digital, and social capabilities become parts of the same product, inevitably increasing the complexity of the product design, builds, new systems and collaboration with ecosystem partners.    

HYPER-CONNECTED BUSINESS

The exponential adoption of advanced technologies presents a vast array of potential changes and investment demands for manufacturing in the years ahead. Huge datasets, AI and autonomous production will combine to execute complexity that extends beyond the human capacity to manage in real time. A virtual facsimile of the physical factory will become the interface to production as physical execution becomes increasingly removed from direct human management decisions and intervention. 

THE FUTURE IS CLOSER

The smart factories of the near future have already begun their digital transformation and early adopters are beginning to create a competitive advantage. By investing in emerging technology, companies across the Middle East are creating technical expertise and critical digital transformation culture they need to succeed and thrive in the years ahead.

Underpinning this fundamental change in factory processes is enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. No amount of automation or innovation will succeed without a way to effectively manage the change or have clear visibility of where efficiencies can be made, and the true value realised.  Only then will regional manufacturers reap the benefits of the current and future wave of technological advances our industry is experiencing right now.