five years ago siemens converted an over 50yearold factory in kalwa in thane that made circuit protection products into a fully digitalised plant while it previously produced 80 variants on three production lines the digitalised plant could produce 180 variants on one production line each product used to take 21 seconds to make that came down to 9 seconds the old factory did 13 quality checks the new one enabled 52capital expenditure and the space required dropped sharply output went up substantially and quality improved dramatically sunil mathur md ceo of siemens india says this is the kind of transformation that small and medium enterprises can and must make it also opens up the export market for you he saysthis is industry 40 where products at the plant communicate with machines and all processes are it controlled peter koerte cto and strategy officer at siemens says digitalised plants double your productivity in plants that are not digitalised your costs may decrease 34 per year but with digitalised ones they drop 67 and thats a big big difference he sayswhile basic digitalisation such as connecting all the machinery helps to do things like predictive maintenance the really big difference comes when data from the shop floor is combined with simulation technologies to create digital twins of the factories once you simulate the flow of goods and people you can check how it would work in real time and in the real world and you can update the simulation based on data from the real worldthis digital twin opens up enormous possibilities imagine koerte says theres a semiconductor shortage and you dont have a chip that goes into one of your products in a traditional setup you would have to stop production and then figure out a way to produce say a lower version that does not have the semiconductor this would take threefour weeks but if you have the digital twin you can run the simulation you can see what steps are needed to produce the lower version and almost overnight you can implement these he says mathur says digital twins also make it enormously simpler to reproduce factories there will be say automotive manufacturers who want to set up plants all over the world they dont have to reinvent the wheel with every plant they can connect them all and they can have a single large digital twin which saves them a lot of learning time and if they want to make any improvement they can test it online before they do it on the ground and then replicate that to all the plants around the world he saystechnologies have also become powerful enough to do whats called multiphysics simulations well these are where you simultaneously simulate different aspects of a physical system or systems and the interactions among them koerte notes that in a car for instance you can today simulate the structural integrity of the body you can simulate the acoustics of how the door sounds when