Months after lockdown, the Indian automobile industry is showing great signs of revival. Piled up inventory is rapidly getting cleared. Passenger car sales have shown a whopping 6.4% rise in one year, While 2 wheelers have experienced a 11.3% jump in sales compared to Sep 2019 data. The numbers are quite promising that lays down Q4 growth foundation.

Festive season in Q3-Q4 revved up the automobile industry in India with stronger demand & better sales. Factors like increased demand for mobility, launch of exciting models, stable supply chain & pushing up of stocks at dealerships has led to revival of October 2020 sales.

The buying trend is likely to continue in December followed by the Christmas & New year boom. 

But the million dollar question is – Is the automobile industry ready to meet the fueling demand?

As suddenly a global shortage of automotive semiconductors, a highly critical component used in the manufacturing of  Electronic Control Units(ECU) is threatening to put a halt to vehicle production in India.

Lets understand ECUs & how they impact car production? 

ECU is a device that controls all the electronic features in a car that are made up of smart microprocessors. They control all essential functions of a car like maintaining perfect cabin temperature, control braking, suspension as well as monitoring tire pressure & fuel economy.

Types of ECU: 

• Engine control module
• Brake control module
• Transmission control module
• Telematic control module
• Suspension control module

 

If you see, ECUs are everywhere, not a single part of a car is untouched by them. Now you must have realized the importance of ECU in building modern day cars.

ECUs control all the important functions of a car. Each one of them are used to improve fuel economy, interior, safety, emergency braking as well as connectivity.

If they become faulty, then the car performance would be affected. You may notice sudden drop in fuel economy and jerky gear shifts, that are constantly indicating Check Engine light in the car dashboard.

The semiconductors used for making the ECUs are sourced from different countries like Malaysia, Korea, China, Belgium & Germany. Majority of the semiconductor industries have closed production at the beginning of this financial year due to a sudden pandemic outbreak.

This shortage has increased due to sudden recovery in demand of 2 wheelers and 4 wheelers, given the lead time 6 to 9 months the industry needs to meet its requirements. 

Such circumstances have led to greater chances of semiconductor deliveries getting impacted in 2021 also.

Semiconductor industries have responded to the sudden spike in demand by expanding their capacities. 

This has led to increase in lead time but companies are managing it with the help of collaborators and tier 1 suppliers. Global Companies supplying the ECUs to the automotive giants are staring at a shortage of imports due to unavailability of essential electronic hardware.  

What would be the result of this unexpected delay in sourcing electronic parts?

Automobile production is getting severely impacted as factories are running at reduced capacity. Coming months would see severe shortage of electronic spare parts. New car buyers have already started experiencing it in the form of longer wait time, followed by steep rise in car booking complaints. 

Engaging a customer to wait is turning into Achilles heel for Automobile companies, as they are reporting huge cancellations, apart from loss of brand reputation. While some of them are trying to pacify the angry customers by offering extra goodies like car accessories while others are offering free 1 year warranty.

How car manufacturers can reduce waiting time and streamline car production?

Regular work like assembling, welding & painting are done mostly by robots. But the Car manufacturing comes at a screeching halt if supply of any important component connecting the crucial engine & dashboard is hit. Supply chain needs continuous monitoring to track the supply & usage of automotive components. 

At this time, when the customers are eagerly waiting to take delivery of their booked cars, it becomes very necessary to ensure that car production capacity is efficiently utilized to meet the growing demand. 

What leading car manufacturers can do it to tackle this situation effectively?

Due to nationwide lockdown, the automotive industry had an expected loss of 7.5 lakh units in production. The shop floors wore a deserted look due to employee absence in daily floor operations and still the situation in Q3 is more or less the same.

The hefty production loss was fueled by lack of inventory accountability, improper utilization of machines, delayed data and inaccurate information about the production.  

Smart Factory solutions powered by ShopWorx are designed to swiftly step in to take the command of the situation and fix these issues of the automobile sector that have impacted production by increasing the wait time for cars.

ShopWorx is a real time monitoring & analytics solution that makes use of smart sensors to convert manufacturing into smart manufacturing. The sensors collect machine data from different parts of the automotive shop floor, collates and relays the data into smart portable devices for analysis. 

With Smart Manufacturing you can

• Monitor shop-floor operations in real-time
• Track Real-Time Machine health & usage
• Predict and eliminate machine breakdowns
• Live Quality Inspection to kill defects at the source

 

ShopWorx assists you by live monitoring, predictive maintenance for uninterrupted, trouble free manufacturing of automobile products, that helps meet the deadline for timely delivery of ordered products to the end customer.

Any inventory & production hurdles gets tracked much in advance before actually affecting manufacturing.

The most exciting part! No manual intervention needed to control and monitor shop floor productions. Its monitoring can be done from miles away, sitting comfortably in your office. 

ShopWorx Production Monitoring System: Automobile industry gets the exact solution for its problems, in the form of a Production Monitoring System to solve manufacturing woes. It is an alternative to manual data collection & captures live production data without any human intervention.

Features of Production Monitoring System:

• Tracks real time automobile production
• Manage inventory, OEE and labor issues
• Gathers data by connecting machines & production floor 
• Get real time analysis of machine cycles
• Predict product quality problems 
• Measures & optimize production
• Analyze data in form of graphs

ShopWorx Predictive & preventive Maintenance: Tired of production cycles getting hampered due to unpredicted machine breakdown? What if you get the power to talk to the machines about their daily health in their language?

Predictive & preventive maintenance is here to help automobile manufacturers predict machine health without affecting the regular production cycle.

Features of predictive & preventive maintenance:

• Automate preventive maintenance by assessing condition of manufacturing equipment to identify maintenance issues
• Predict time or condition based maintenance without affecting manufacturing during production hours
• Shop floor supervisors get dedicated apps to assign maintenance activity
• Management get tv dashboard displaying maintenance activity

ShopWorx Statistical and advance process controls:

You get statistical and advanced process controls to analyze real time data that aids in decision making without any delay that can affect production & delivery of products.

Features of Statistical and advance process controls:

• Get real time configurable charts as per the demand
• Get alerts on tv dashboard, SMS and email
• Manually capture data through E-logbook

ShopWorx Quality Inspection:

Worried about product rejections and rising customer complaints due to product quality issues? ShopWorx quality inspection would help kill the defects easily at its occurrence stage.

Features of Quality Inspection:

• Get real time monitoring of process parameters
• Know & capture reasons for rejections digitally
• Analyze & get to know reasons of batch inspection
• Continuously monitor process parameters without fail

ShopWorx Utility Consumption Monitoring: 

Get your own customized energy monitoring dashboard for daily shop floor operations to keep track of utility consumption.

• Monitor fuel, electricity, air, water, gas consumption through live data
• Real time monitoring and analytics of consumption
• Save energy by 5-7% 

ShopWorx Advance analytics and Machine Learning:

With advanced analytics & machine learning you get the power of prediction.

• Easily Predict rejections at the shop floor
• Predict product quality with machine learning
• Detect real time production roadblocks
• Get recommended production planner in advance to mitigate risks

CONCLUSION

ShopWorx is the complete solution to optimize manufacturing and production delays. It empowers the automobile industry for just in time delivery of end products by mitigating risks and increasing production efficiency by sensing, analyzing, digitizing and transforming crucial shop floor processes.