Beyond the "Fancy" Dashboard: Realizing the True Power of Connected Manufacturing

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January 2026 : Digital transformation is often celebrated through a lens of high-tech terminology and sleek interfaces, but the reality on the factory floor is far more nuanced. During a roundtable discussion hosted by Dassault Systèmes, Shravan Kumar from the BMW Chennai Plant offered a candid reality check on the current state of industrial digitalization. His insights serve as a cautionary tale for any leader who views technology as a purely aesthetic or competitive trophy.

One of the most profound challenges in modern manufacturing is the tendency to digitize existing, inefficient processes without actually transforming them. Kumar shared a metaphor often used by his Managing Director to keep the team grounded: "Shravan, you know one thing, if you digitize the caterpillar, it will not become a butterfly. Maybe it will increase the speed of the crawling, right?"

This "crawling speed" mentality highlights a major pitfall: creating systems that are more difficult to use than the manual processes they replaced. If a system is implemented simply because a neighbor or competitor is using it, without a clear purpose or pain point to solve, it is destined for obsolescence. Without a fundamental shift in how work is done, technology only serves to accelerate old mistakes.

Kumar also addressed the phenomenon of "dashboard bloat," where organizations create hundreds of visual reports simply because they have the IT budget to do so. This lack of discipline leads to what he calls a "Digi-odd" - a state where data becomes a graveyard rather than a guide.

"You will have, you will create a dashboard, 1, 2, 3, 4... it goes up to 80, 100. When you start to review those 100 dashboards, how could you imagine where we are right now and where you want to reach? If all kinds of your data become a Digi-odd, one day it becomes a graveyard." This lack of consistency - where dashboards change from September to October only to be abandoned by November - creates a cycle of confusion. True connected manufacturing requires the discipline to focus on data that drives decision-making, rather than just filling screens with fancy charts.

Despite these challenges, Kumar is a firm believer in the transformative potential of a truly connected shop floor. The real breakthrough isn't in the dashboard itself, but in the visibility it provides across global boundaries. In the past, what happened in one corner of a factory might be unknown to a neighbor; today, the horizon is worldwide.

For Kumar, the core value of connected manufacturing is the ability to react instantly to abnormalities. Whether a leader is in India or halfway across the globe, real-time data allows for immediate decision-making. This connectivity ensures that production can run continuously without disruption, turning a potential crisis in one hemisphere into a solved problem in another. The goal of technology, he concludes, should always be to make the shop floor worker's life simpler and the organization’s reaction time faster.

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