Pune-headquartered Global Metal Forging Leader, Bharat Forge has achieved Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) by over 15% in several of their forging lines, using Nasdaq-listed IoT firm, PTC Inc’s digital manufacturing solutions. With profit margins becoming tighter, India’s largest exporter of automotive parts has kickstarted a digital transformation journey for the company to improve operational efficiency at its manufacturing plants over the next five years.
As part of its “Industry 4.0 Center of Excellence” project in partnership with PTC Inc, Bharat Forge has pursued an end-to-end digital transformation for two of its manufacturing plants, including reskilling of over 2,500 engineers. The company intends to have zero unplanned downtime in the hydraulics, pneumatics, and electronics sectors, and plans to further deploy the PTC solution overseas at its plants in Germany and the US.
“This is in line with our vision of moving towards a digitized workplace for higher levels of productivity and efficiency across all the operating processes. Leveraging PTC’s technology stack and Bharat Forge’s strong manufacturing excellence, we will drive digital innovation and derive significant business value,” said Amit Kalyani, Deputy Managing Director at Bharat Forge.
Yogesh Zope, Chief Digital Officer at Bharat Forge said that the catalyst for success for Bharat Forge was prioritizing the mindset of its people during the digital transformation process. “The forging lines in four of our industrial complexes were operating with various technologies and processes, so the need to improve production efficiency was critical. Nearly 70-80% of digital transformation efforts have gone into changing people’s mindsets. The effort has paid off well.”
Dhirendra Kulkarni – Senior Director of Solution Consulting Group at PTC said, “Bharat forge has led the digitalisation journey amongst their peers in their industry. Their unique transformation approach did not just include adoption of technology but a company-wide motion to have their frontline workforce lead their transformation which was critical to their success. We believe that Industry 4.0 is the future of manufacturing, and it would transform enterprise digital thread in a big way in the coming decade.”
“We continue to work with Bharat Forge in their future projects of enabling digital thread, digital twin and advanced analytics projects with our digital transformation solution suite”
Bharat Forge has so far implemented condition monitoring via PTC’s IoT solutions across all their forging lines in their four industrial complexes in India. Now, the company is implementing it in all their machining shops, in their intent to reduce the cost of operations and increase efficiency.