GEC NEWS WIRETotal number of years in service: 22 years
Do you call yourself a digital organization? If yes, why?
Yes, GARMCO is a digital organization. Since past few years it has been a great focus and has achieved a major Digital Transformation, Automation of Office and Manufacturing Processes, Consolidation of Infrastructure and Corporate applications worldwide to Corporate Head Office in Bahrain, tightly integration of the Plant Machinery with the in-house developed Plant automation ERP to avoid any Human errors and help improving the productivity, increasing the plant and process efficiencies, improving the Human and Plant safety culture and huge cost saving year on year.
As a manufacturing company, GARMCO is the First in Bahrain to go live on AWS cloud.
As a manufacturing company, GARMCO is the First (if not the only) to achieve tight integration of its manufacturing plant machinery with the ERP system – achieving true online and real-time Plant–ERP operations.
The organization is enjoying a paperless office (90%) with the help of numerous workflows, fully virtualized environment – both Servers and Desktop, BYOD ready, Business Intelligence, robotics, censor based data processing over wireless. GARMCO has also achieved various ISO certifications.
With all the efforts, we have been successful in areas like ‘Elimination of Human Errors’, ‘Efficient use of Technology’, Speed to Customer Response’, ‘Improved Governance’, ‘Lower Downtimes’, ‘Cost Saving Initiatives’ and last but not the least we are targeting to achieve ‘Industry 4.0’ shortly.
What are your top projects for the next 6 months?
We have a list of top priority projects. To list a few :
- VAT Readiness: We are making the needful changes in our systems to be compliant with the VAT regulations.
- Cloud Roadmap: We are working on a Roadmap for long term Cloud Computing and Cloud Services.
- IoT initiatives: We are exploring IoT for quality improvements, automation of some critical processes, and identification of certain claims and minimizing those claims.
- More Global Consolidations: As part of our continuous consolidation initiatives, we will continue the consolidation of systems and processes at Global level.
What are the key technologies challenges faced by your sector?
In a manufacturing sector, the major technology challenge is the alignment of the corporate technology advancement with the Plant technology. Plant level technology advancements are slower and more expensive than a normal corporate technology needs.
Legacy based technology upgrades cost fortune in manufacturing sectors, therefore, although one can upgrade the corporate based technologies with the technology trend changes but they need to wait till the manufacturing related technologies are upgraded.
This is the major cause for mature manufacturing units to achieve the Industry 4.0 so rapidly. But any green field plant may find it relatively easier to plan well for the Industry 4.0 readiness from inception.
What kind of vendor/solution provider engagement do you look forward to in 2018?
Although I have a great in-house team who does all the development and support, but I would like to look forward for:
- Experienced Cloud Partners and consultant engagements to ensure we avoid mistakes which others have encountered and spent a fortune.
- Cybersecurity and Forensic engagements
- IoT solution providers with manufacturing experience who can help in implementation of solutions which can improve quality, automation and error and defect detections before occurrence.
To do list for 2018
- Ensuring the systems are ready with VAT regulations
- Working with Cloud service providers to finalize the Roadmap for Cloud.
- Consolation of global operations to corporate system as part of Global Consolidation vision.
- Applications and Technology upgrades
- More on Business Intelligence and IoT initiatives.
