Industrial IoT Is Driving the UK Automotive Industry Forward

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

With an uncertain road ahead, how can the UK automotive industry prepare itself for the post-Brexit world? How do we remain competitive and relevant in a challenging marketplace? To my mind, there are a handful of key areas automotive manufactures can focus on to retain their rightful place in the market. 

Unlocking innovation in new transportation trends

The UK is well known for its engineering prowess. Our education system is set up to produce leading talent, and now is the time to bring that to bear in the automotive space. Industry must consider the full lifecycle of a vehicle, from concept through to eventual retirement from service.  

How do we innovate in the conceptualisation of new transport experiences so that the UK remains front and centre in these emerging capabilities? Here, we should consider not just autonomous vehicles, but also their ancillary services that enhance the customer experience.

• Supply chain innovations: We need to look at a few aspects of the supply chain: lessening our overall reliance on imports; using newer technologies such as additive manufacturing that enable smarter, lighter designs and a reduced CO2 footprint due to lower materials mileage; and providing an integrated, connected supply chain to ensure full control over the production process.

• Vehicle replacement and retirement: It’s important to consider how we can innovate in product use and end-of-life processing, ensuring the customer experience is seamless whilst encouraging brand stickiness and ongoing in-region purchasing for locally manufactured vehicles. This also plays into the changing economics of the vehicle market particularly for individuals, in that private owners are moving towards being private lessors, no longer owning a car but owning the experience your brand provides. 

Gaining competitive edge in emerging sectors

To remain relevant, the UK must ensure it can bring innovations to market ahead of other regions. We don’t need to be the first mover in the segment, however we should certainly come to the table with strong offerings that are not yet widely adopted by the hype cycle but are gaining momentum in emerging sectors of the industry. Key examples are safety, in-car entertainment, navigation, connected vehicles, artificial intelligence – I’m still waiting for KITT…

One challenge I see in every industry with customers both big and small is visibility into their processes. “How many cars did line two produce today? How many of those achieved all their quality thresholds? How did that compare with yesterday, or a year ago today?” Sometimes the simplest of metrics, widely available and standardised in their calculation between sites, can have dramatic impacts on how a company operates. Step one on the journey into Industry 4.0 is knowing your starting position. Without that, you have no basis from which to estimate how far you can improve, and to understand when you’re changing the right things. 

Getting started on this journey means connecting and digitising systems. Automation systems are a great way to do this, and adding a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is even better. Using this, your processes generate actual data which, when combined with MES, gives you valuable insights. That enables simple statistics or KPIs to be generated, which in itself can start to drive behavioural changes in manufacturers. Automation is not always about reducing headcount from a process – in most instances it’s about knowledge, helping operators do their jobs better.

How is Industry 4.0 different? It connects machines, technology, processes and people into a single source, ideally across the entire value chain and lifecycle of the product or service. This allows companies to make informed decisions with a full understanding of the impact on their operations. For example, in response to a slump in the market, should we reduce manufacturing output, and if so, by how much? Using Digital Twins, we can model the impact of these changes and give ourselves some idea of what the future may hold, subject to the usual confidence factors and model fidelity.

 Put simply, Industry 4.0 is a data source integrator – all sources, all types, all the time. It uses a prediction model to propose operating plans that can then be fed back into your automation and control systems for implementation once approved – or in control system parlance, the closed loop feedback system.

Does the UK automotive industry have a bright future? Absolutely. Do we have work to achieve that future? Absolutely, but working together as an industry we can collectively achieve these things and more, confidently retaining our seat at the table.