SMART INDUSTRY CONFERENCE
<span style="font-weight: bold;">With around 150 delegates, the fifth Smart Industry Conference provided know-how on the topics of automation, Industrial IoT and digitalisation.</span><p></p><p> In order to spread awareness of the latest technologies and open source solutions that empower Indian machine builders and factories to implement advanced automation solutions, the Ethernet POWERLINK Standardization Group has been organising the Smart Industry Conference for the past five years. The fifth edition of the Smart Industry Conference in Pune centred around bringing digital transformation to the Indian manufacturing market cost-effectively. Partners of the conference included ABB India, Unlimit IoT, and B&R Industrial Automation. C4i4Lab, a world-class centre promoting innovation and adoption of Industry 4.0 solutions, was the supporting organisation of the conference in order to enhance global competitiveness of Indian industry.</p><p> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Digital transformation</span><br />The conference started with a presentation on "Digitalisation across the value chain'by <span style="font-weight: bold;">Subrata Karmakar, LBL Manager, ABB Robotics and LSM, ABB RA India.</span> He described how factories are shifting toward agility - with low volume, high mix and shorter cycles. </p><p>This was followed by presentation on "Digital transformation - Making factories future ready', delivered by <span style="font-weight: bold;">Prabhat Singh Sengar, Sales, Process and Factory Automation, B&R Industrial Automation. </span>Speaking on edge architectures, Sengar explained how these middleware solutions enable factories to become smart and go a long way to improving efficiency. Transforming manufacturing ecosystem with Industrial IoT A panel discussion on the subject "Key strategies for end-to-end Industrial IoT implementation and its value proposition'was conducted by Ranjithkumar G, Specialist - Technology and Network, B&R Industrial Automation. The prominent panelists for the discussion were <span style="font-weight: bold;">Subrata Karmakar, LBL Manager, ABB Robotics and LSM, ABB RA; Pravin Bambal, Vertical Head (I4.0), Unlimit IoT and Tanay Sil, Head - Business Development, B&R Industrial Automation. </span>The panel also deliberated on "How to acquire meaningful data from brownfield installations and use it for decision-making'since data engineering is gaining importance today. </p><p> <span style="font-weight: bold;">Data engineering and open communication technology</span><br />The final session of the conference focused on data engineering as a driver for digitalisation. Taking up the topic, <span style="font-weight: bold;">Robin Dmello, General Manager, Unlimit IoT,</span> discussed some of the problems companies face when they collect and store data - particularly in an era when our machine learning models require huge amounts of labelled data. The latter half of the session saw a presentation on "Industrial interoperability from sensor to cloud'by Ranjithkumar G, Specialist - Technologies and Network, B&R Industrial Automation. </p><p>This year's Smart Industry Conference gave participants a roadmap for successful digital transformation with a focus on the perspective of the Indian market, informed by global trends and technologies. The conference offered a mix of technical presentations, panel discussions and demonstrations, each aimed at different aspects of the connected factory.</p><p></p>