Australia has an ambition to revive the manufacturing sector to achieve sovereign capability, robust local supply chains and drive economic growth with employment opportunities for future generations. Additionally, the strategic objectives are to develop world class products and services to participate in global trade and create export opportunities. In essence, the country is adopting a strategy to evolve into a manufacturing knowledge hub to build a long term sustainable economic environment based on pillars of knowledge and skills in advanced manufacturing.
Mining has long been a cornerstone of the Australian economy and the sector itself has showcased the future of new industry via autonomous vehicles such as Trucks and Railways. And now in recent times electrification is enabling the industry with electric vehicles and renewable power sources. In the current geo-political environment, defense spending is driving the acquisition of new submarines, ships and aircraft, which is further boosting manufacturing sector growth in Australia for build and sustainment of old and new platforms. The defense programs are also driving the growth of Australian local content, which is vital for sustainment in the near future.
In addition, future industry sectors such as hydrogen, future mobility, advanced air mobility and plant-based protein are driving industry growth in the country. The digitalisation across industry sectors is creating new opportunities for newer products and services industries. The pace of change with this digitalisation has never been seen before and is creating the demand for a new skilled workforce across industry sectors. In addition, the growing demand for new products is fueling the need for research and development activities. The policy makers have sensed the emerging need and trailblazer grants were put in place to capitalise it for economic growth.
Railway electrification
Hydrogen production
To capture the opportunities arising in the world and developments mentioned above, manufacturing in Australia has to adopt advance manufacturing capabilities. The product development cannot operate at the usual traditional pace and requires a robust roadmap supported by new capabilities. The ability to deliver faster to market and agility to scale are vital for the success of new manufacturing facilities. This can be achieved only via integrated manufacturing with design & engineering and supported by strong collaboration across disciplines within the organisation. The enablers of this strategy are technology stacks, which will define the success of each organisation.
The advanced manufacturing capability is all about the improvement of products or services with cutting edge technologies. The technologies are available in the market today and some technology vendors’ offerings include accelerated product development focused strategy bundled with toolkits. Dassault Systemes is one of the pioneers offering 3DEXPERIENCE platform which underpins the required strategy into platform – collaboration, ideation and digital continuity. The large OEM’s such as Boeing, Land Rover, Tesla are the living examples. At the same time, the shakers of the new market – Joby, Yuri, Interstellar, Hopium, Alauda Aeronautics are young start-up companies adopted same platform to leverage the capabilities for advanced manufacturing.
In Australia itself, we have a growing list of young companies from space, battery, hydrogen industry, mobility and advanced air mobility sectors adopting 3DEXPERIENCE platform. The commonality among all the adopters is the need for collaboration and data insights across organisations from engineers to business executives. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform technology is also embraced for integrating legacy and other business applications to drive continuous innovation. The additional benefit of digital continuity offered by 3DEXPERIENCE is to virtually validate the manufacturing process and integration with IoT, Robotics and automation control systems.
Robotics
Future digitalisation
Digital Manufacturing is a vital component of advanced manufacturing to test the new product development process and agility of the manufacturing capacity. The sustainability factor has become an immediate need of businesses building new products and capability to support their industry sectors. The advanced manufacturing capability such as 3Dprinting is in early phases but closing towards industry scale production. For Australia, additive manufacturing will remain a vital capability to advance the manufacturing sector.
The choice of tools does impact the strategy implementation and many stories around the market can help to uncover this truth. The digital continuity and collaboration are at the core of advance manufacturing capabilities to build the virtual twin. With the advent of IoT, AI and ML techniques, the virtual twin can help to harness the value from the derived data and provide insights for improvement into product development and the life cycle of products. The lack of comprehensive virtual twin will limit the ability to generate insightful information for advanced manufacturing capabilities.
To successfully manage the transformation offered by advanced manufacturing, upskilling and a new skilled work force remain critical challenges. MEMKO has been at the forefront of this agenda and working in close collaboration with its technology partner Dassault Systemes, Industry Primes and Academic Partners. The capability development will demand new capacity and hence, the need for skilling work force both the current and new work force on relevant industry skill set is key for success in manufacturing sector.
Conclusion
In summary, the advanced manufacturing capability is going to transform Australian manufacturing. The key enabler of advanced manufacturing is a technology stack, which can enhance collaboration, continuous innovation and provide digital continuity. The size of the company is not a hurdle in the adoption of advanced manufacturing capability. Each company needs to have a focused strategy and roadmap for their journey, which needs to be enabled via suitable technology such as the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Without an enabler, the strategy will be static and old traditional ways will not deliver any new outcomes desired by the industry.
Ravi Jain, a qualified materials engineer and metallurgist graduated from IIT Bombay. He holds an MBA from Bond University and a Certificate in Applied Finance from QUT. He is currently the General Manager of MEMKO Systems based in Melbourne. Ravi is a passionate technocrat, helping enterprise customers formulate transformative strategies and adopt innovative technologies to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. He has led the market development for novel technologies both for MNCs and emerging start-ups. During his 18+yr career, he has worked across Defense, Mining and O&G verticals within Australia, APAC and EMEA territory. He has a deep understanding of engineering and manufacturing processes for these Industry verticals. In addition, he brings extensive knowledge about technologies in the field of OT/IT integration, 3D Visualisation, process automation, data analytics and PLM software.
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is a business and innovation digital software platform for product development that provides organisations with a holistic, real-time view of their business activity and ecosystem. It connects people, ideas, data and solutions in a single collaborative environment empowering business – from startups to large enterprises – to innovate, produce and trade in entirely new ways.
