India’s Leading Bearings Manufacturer takes Digital Transformation to the Next Level

National Engineering Industries Limited (NEI) embarked on a mission to convert one of its brownfield factories into a smart, connected plant using the latest digital technologies.

Founded in 1946, National Engineering Industries Limited (NEI) is one of India’s leading bearings manufacturers and exporters. Under the NBC Bearings brand, the company started making 30,000 bearings in 19 sizes. Today, it has grown to manufacture over 200 million bearings annually offered in more than 2,300 variants to service customers in over 30 countries across five continents.

Always looking to serve its partners better, NEI embarked on a digital transformation journey, achieving outstanding results. It set a goal to achieve a connected smart factory state for all its manufacturing locations over the next year. Thus far, one of its plants in Jaipur has embarked on multiple rollouts and achieved the desired state at scale.

Drivers for digital transformation

It was not purely a numbers game but also the zeal to continue being a great place to work for future generations and become an employer of choice that propelled NEI to undertake an end-to-end digital transformation journey.

Before digitalization, manufacturing process and performance data was manually captured on paper and logged into an application by a data entry operator. The data was then available for analysis, but with a 24-hour lag, challenging line managers and supervisors to make decisions for the day based on yesterday’s data.

NEI knew that Industry 4.0 technology was the answer to this issue. The need for real-time data would allow line supervisors and managers to take immediate action on problematic areas, whether related to quality, maintenance or raw material, to avoid potential loss in productivity.

The connected smart factory aimed to improve the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) by 2-3%. This was a significant stretch given the baseline of operations were higher than industry standards.

Furthermore, NEI’s digital transformation strategy was meant to help the company stay ahead of the competition with a data-driven decision-making approach and mindset switch – that is, to be more proactive and less reactive on the shopfloor

The digital performance management initiative

NEI’s vision was to establish a connected, smart factory in the brownfield Jaipur plant and subsequently across all other manufacturing locations, enabling the company to meet its present and future manufacturing and business requirements.

NEI’s President and CEO, Rohit Saboo, envisioned one Connected Enterprise from demand to dispatch with a seamless flow of information across the various systems present in NEI’s landscape.

Integrating control and information across the information technology/operational technology (IT/OT) boundary helps to provide real-time insights into the manufacturing process to drive more meaningful business decisions. This digital performance management initiative aimed to create a connected smart plant with integrated information from supply chain for factory scheduling, energy management system, resource allocation and material visibility. This is meticulously supported by digital workplace, products, and services to enrich employee and business partner experiences across every stage of interaction.

“Through the enterprise-wide digital program, we have developed a digital strategy roadmap that connects the digital initiatives to the organization’s strategic priorities. The full-scale implementation was planned for the ball bearing plant in Jaipur and scheduled over an eight-month period. We were able to reach here after lots of experimentation in the preceding year with many startups and ecosystem solution providers,” said Ashish Ranjan, chief digital officer, NEI.

This initiative involved connecting more than 300 computer numerical control (CNC) and programmable logic controller (PLC) machines to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) network, working on a diverse set of controllers from various makes, models and generations. NEI built an Open Platform Communications United Architecture (OPC UA) data layer and IoT platform deployment to render real-time data with reports and dashboards used by various personas in the organization from the plant floor through to the enterprise.

NEI called on Rockwell Automation as a trusted technology partner for the digitalization project, leveraging the flexibility of the FactoryTalk® InnovationSuite and ThingWorx Asset Performance Management (APM) platforms.

ThingWorx APM was selected as the application development and deployment platform – connecting disparate devices, applications and data sources across the enterprise. It provides one source to collect, aggregate, and provide secure access to industrial operations data.

FactoryTalk® Analytics™ DataView was selected for NEI’s business reporting requirements., delivering increased visibility of line, shop floor, plant and enterprise performance.

“FactoryTalk InnovationSuite provides a holistic technology portfolio including IoT, analytics, augmented reality and edge capabilities to support NEI’s digital transformation vision. These technologies delivered the required modularity, flexibility and user friendliness to address the immediate techno-functional needs of the digital performance management initiative while helping to ensure that the solution is capable of scaling to advanced analytics use cases on the same platform,” said Samrat Datta, information solutions sales specialist, Rockwell Automation.

Smart, connected manufacturing for bearings

This project was one of the largest digital transformation implementations in the bearing industry. More than 300 machines in the brownfield setup were brought onto the IIoT platform and connected in real time per Industry 4.0 norms. Data exchange compatibility for the factory increased from just 16% at pre-assessment to now 100% at deployment time.

“NEI and Rockwell Automation have a very close working relationship. The teams are closely integrated at the plant level as well as the enterprise level. With regular collaboration, NEI considers Rockwell Automation a trusted partner for its digital manufacturing transformation at Jaipur and eventual implementations at other sites,” said Ashish.

Now that the Jaipur plant is a connected plant, the benefits it delivers are being felt. Real-time availability of data on user-friendly dashboards have led to a mindset change among the shopfloor operators. Supervisors and operators can monitor operations performance and make quicker decisions regarding material and resource allocation. The health signals from machines help to avoid any unplanned breakdown by taking pro-active actions.

“NEI can be congratulated on embarking on a digital transformation journey that has achieved outstanding results using contemporary, flexible and scalable technologies,” said Arvind Kakru, country head of end-user sales, Rockwell Automation India.

Users of these solutions have asked for more after experiencing the power of real-time data and the Rockwell Automation team is working on enhancing the experience. This would continue for some time as more insights can be derived from the data visibility.

“Very soon, we will integrate all our plants at different geographical locations onto the same platform to establish one enterprise network with seamless integration of systems across the enterprise. This will give us the required visibility across plant locations and help us to move to a new operating model with connected plants and remote monitoring centers leveraging the strength of NEI across all manufacturing locations,” concluded Sanjay Binaykya, head of manufacturing, NEI.