Introduction
Aeronautical engineers of the next destination airport getting information, even before landing, about which parts of a flying aircraft’s engine are to be examined and repairedbefore clearance for the next flight is no longer a farfetched imagination. Industrial internet of things (IIoT) embedded with sensors and signal emitting capability can provide online real time information about the engine’s health to those ground engineers and manufacturer of the aircraft. Similarly,it is no longer a matter of imagination that a refrigerator can send information to the owner’s smart phone about depletion of stored food materials, average consumptions, and new orders to be placed. If permitted, it can directly place orders to the vendor, like Siri and Alexa of smart phones can play music as you wish to listen and order them to play. Aircraft and refrigerator buyers in these examples as prosumers1 can help manufacturers to customise product design and pre-feed the IoTs with the required metadata and other relevant information as they would prefer when such IoTs are made artificially intelligent. These examples of end-products are smarter than their previous versions. Many more such smart products will soon be available in markets. If a product can be made smarter why not its manufacturing processes.

In a lay man’s perception smart manufacturing means application of robots. Use of robots is just one of many more that are required for digital transformation of manufacturing operations in a smart factory. In the emerging business ecosystem end to end effectiveness of entire plant operations will be the critical most factor for sustaining with competitive advantages beyond labour productivity and efficiency in capital asset utilisations.

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