India Industrial Automation Market is expected to register a CAGR of 13.12% over the next five years

Factory Automation Solutions are driving the market in the country

Industrial automation refers to intelligent machines and programmable logic to automate several industrial processes and minimize human intervention.

Industrial automation improves the efficiency and quality of the output and maintains consistency throughout the micro and macro-level processes across the industries. The Industrial control systems consist of several factory automation solutions such as DCS, SCADA, PLC, HMI, and many others.

With the development of the Indian manufacturing sector, there has been a need for a more competitive edge in productivity, profitability, safety, and sustainable manufacturing processes. The concept of semi-knock-down manufacturing and domestic manufacturing is likely to increase in the future due to the ‘Make in India’ initiative and the relaxation of FDI policies in the manufacturing sector across different industries.

Process automation devices and equipment, which have applications in several sectors, including pharmaceutical, coal, power, oil and gas, cement, and others, have witnessed a dramatic growth in the manufacturing sector in India. The different process automation devices have accelerated the expansion of the manufacturing sector in India.

Most of the premium OEMs in India now offer either display audio or navigation units as a standard feature, apart from the base variant. In contrast, volume OEMs are rapidly shifting towards offering these units. Large touch screens that support smartphone integration and navigation HMI units are slowly replacing traditional radio/stereo units.

In complicated consumer electronics supply chains such as for smartphones and white goods, warehouses are critical nodal points. For instance, between a Xiaomi phone manufactured near Chennai and its delivery to a home in Aizawl in Mizoram by Amazon, there are almost six big and small warehouses. One of Xiaomi’s contract manufacturers maintains three warehouses. The phone is shipped by a seller to Amazon’s warehouse in Kolkata. It is further shipped to a smaller warehouse in Guwahati and, finally, to another in the destination town, Aizawl. This factor drives the need for an efficient network of warehouses and processing centers for consumer electronics in India using warehouse automation solutions.

Pharmaceuticals industry has fastest growth in the market

Despite the fact that India’s pharmaceutical industry has traditionally been based mainly on manual operations, the sector is increasingly adopting automation technologies and rapidly growing. It is now adopting new automated operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) to remain competitive in a connected world.

According to the IBEF, India is the world’s largest provider of generic drugs. The country’s pharmaceutical sector supplies more than 50% of the demand for various vaccines around the world, 40% of the demand in the United States, and around 25% of all medicine in the United Kingdom. Moreover, India ranks third in pharmaceutical production by volume and 14th by value globally. The Indian pharmaceutical industry includes a network of 3,000 drug companies and approximately 10,500 manufacturing units.

The pharmaceutical industry brings unique challenges with it. The chemical integrity of prescription drugs and other high-purity substances relies on the stringent control of several variables. Since drugs and substances must be perfectly consistent across all batches, the monitoring and control of production processes are vital – from processing to transport to delivery. For that, many companies deploy Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.

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