IIT Madras launches ‘Smart Manufacturing & Digital Transformation Centre’

To democratise smart manufacturing and digital transformation in the country, Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) has launched the Smart Manufacturing and Digital Transformation Centre (SMDTC). It has been established in joint partnership between Advanced Manufacturing Technology Development Centre (AMTDC), a Centre of Excellence at IIT Madras, MESA International (Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association) and Cantier Systems and will create the foundation elements to leapfrog toward world class and self-reliant manufacturing.
 
Professor N Ramesh Babu, Faculty, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Madras, and Secretary, AMTDC, said, “SMDTC will lead in provisioning a smart manufacturing model factory,  experience centre and also support collaborative research, innovation for Industry 4.0 in process intelligence, robotics and machining dynamics control automation.”
 
The centre will focus on smart manufacturing education and community interaction for capacity building, smart manufacturing maturity assessment, Smart Manufacturing Experience Center with model factory facilities, collaborative research and end-to-end innovation for Smart Process Intelligence, 5G enablement to democratise smart manufacturing adoption and smart manufacturing supply chain collaboration.
 
With in-built capabilities like monitoring, alarming and visual dashboards for real-time predictive decision support, it will create a unified platform for the next generation of smart manufacturing for Legacy Manufacturing Assets by contextually liberating relevant data from the shop floor equipment/devices and delivering exponential business value to the enterprise.
 
According to IIT Madras, the plans in the immediate term include smart manufacturing maturity assessment and continuous improvement, workforce development through high impact vocational training programs on smart manufacturing and industry 4.0 and implementation experience sharing with case studies. 5G enablement to democratise smart manufacturing adoption will also be taken up besides virtual smart manufacturing supply chain collaboration and providing students with engagements in hands-on implementation of Smart Manufacturing technologies.
 
“Derived from the global experiences of MESA’s International members, the SMDTC will help in Smart Manufacturing Education and Maturity Assessment so that the Indian MSMEs can get access to the latest global implementation practices. Cantier will provide MES 4.0 platform to create the Smart Manufacturing Experience Centre,” says Prabakar Selvam, Chairman - MESA APAC & CEO at Cantier Systems.

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