Inovance is betting on strong growth in Indian Manufacturing

This editorial was first published in the April issue of Machinist magazine.

By Anil Kumar, Inovance Technology India

Industrial automation received a huge global boost during the pandemic. While the underlying benefits of automation – such as increased efficiency, reduced costs, and improved accuracy and repeatability – have not changed, the Covid lockdowns meant that automation offered manufacturers an additional benefit: the ability to keep operating under conditions of social distancing. In India specifically, the imperative to automate has always been a little behind other parts of the world because of our comparatively lower labor costs. But that is changing fast and it’s changing for two reasons.

Firstly, manufacturers are realising that saving labor costs is not actually usually the prime reason to automate. The prime reason to automate is, arguably, the improved accuracy and repeatability that automation can offer. Secondly, as India moves up the value chain of the global economy, wages are increasing and Indian manufacturers are also attempting to make more complex products (witness the recent stories about Apple looking to increasingly have India as a major manufacturing base for its products). It is simply not possible to make complex advanced modern products without using up-to-date automation. Most particularly, if India is to succeed in becoming a global manufacturing-for-export hub, automation is essential.

It won’t just be factories that automate either. The other ripe target for automation is warehousing. Factories themselves use automated warehouses, but e-commerce warehouses will become an increasingly important part of the economy. The wealthier India gets, the more e-commerce will grow, and intralogistics automation solutions will become absolutely critical to running successful e-commerce in India, as they already are in the West.

Of course, before India can become a hub of highly automated manufacturing, it needs a network of industrial automation companies offering the best products and solutions. Industrial automation companies cannot stand still, it is important for them to continuously update their technology to provide better solutions to their customers so they can keep up with the latest trends and remain competitive.  The latest digital technologies help Indian manufacturers in a range of different ways, with digital transformation helping them to meet goals relating to productivity, efficiency, and uptime.

My company – Inovance – aims to become an Indian market leader in automation and motion control, and it is striving for this goal by investing heavily to lay down a firm foundation in the country. We have a national sales network that covers Kolkata, Bengaluru, Pune, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Vadodara, and Jaipur. And we have large directly employed local team of sales, product management, and research and development engineers based at our network of office facilities in Chennai, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and New Delhi. Ultimately the reason Inovance is so well placed to succeed is simple: it has a reputation for top quality products backed up by the strongest engineering expertise and customer support.

Inovance is a complete industrial automation solutions provider with expert engineering capabilities. Its product offering ranges from AC drives, servo drives and motors, to motion control, industrial robots, PLCs, CNCs, and HMIs. Within the industrial automation segment, Inovance supplies OEM machine builders and end users across a wide range of industrial sectors, including packaging, textiles, rubber, plastics, printing, and special purpose machinery. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Inovance delivered full automation solutions for face mask manufacturing machinery, while working with over 140 OEM customers involved in the production of PPE.

Recently, we launched a new compact, EtherCAT-enabled Easy Series PLC, replacing the previous H1U PLC offering with an improved automation solution. The Easy PLC series is compact and covers everything from simple pulse architecture to complex motion control applications. It supports various fieldbus communications like MODBUS-RTU, MODBUS-TCP, EtherCAT, Ethernet/IP and CANopen. This Easy PLC series has an easy-to-use customer interface in order to achieve maximum efficiency by supporting function block and encapsulation, code reusability, and scalability. One highlight of this PLC is that it can be used widely in all complex automation solutions for the textile, packaging, and printing industries.

To continue the conversation about industrial automation in India, contact Anil today: anil.kumar@inovance.ind.in

Anil Kumar is the managing director of Inovance Technology India. Inovance Technology India is the Indian arm of Inovance, a $3 billion global industrial automation company.