Lights-out operations: Why autonomous manufacturing matters

Lights out operations that leverage AI and robotics are becoming a business imperative in a competitive global landscape.

In brief

• Manufacturing companies in the Asia-Pacific region have established a leadership position in smart factory and industrial robotics deployment.
• As companies in the US and Europe deploy lights-out operations, they are also finding they need to make significant technology and infrastructure investments.
• Even though the concept reduces the need for human intervention, keeping people in the loop is still essential to ongoing oversight of the operation.

Global organizations are moving to embrace lights-out operations — the ability to leverage AI, robotics and other advanced technologies to run facilities and processes with minimal human intervention. While some Western organizations have realized significant productivity and cost benefits, those gains have largely come through low-hanging fruit initiatives, such as automating packaging and night shift production lines.

Why lights-out is the way of the future

Organizations are adopting lights-out operations for several reasons: they enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs and improve safety by minimizing human exposure to potentially hazardous environments. Companies that have worked with the EY Smart Factory, for example, report sustainable improvements in cost and cash, including higher manufacturing reliability and a digitally enabled shop floor.

While many manufacturers in technologically advanced nations in the Americas and Europe can implement at least two lights-out processes in their factories, many of these processes typically represent high-volume tasks in procurement or fulfillment packaging. Moreover, activities involving repetitive tasks in electronics, automotive body or battery manufacturing are often limited to specific production lines or night shifts.

Why the incremental approach falls short

However, most Western companies have started the journey with greenfield operations, such as fulfillment warehouses. For more advanced manufacturing operations, companies need to design processes that carefully integrate robots and AI tools into existing workflows. Redesigning workflows requires organizations to consider the role humans will play, ranging from control-room supervision and maintenance to process engineering and cyber governance. Additionally, organizations must establish guidelines for exception management, which remains critical even in fully dark operations where human involvement is minimal.

Lights-out operations scale faster when processes are stable and standardized, which is why establishing a strong foundation is often the best approach. This foundation should feature strong telemetry from well-established data sources and integrate well-engineered safety systems with built-in safeguards to prevent accidents and minimize risks. Characterized by end-to-end processes that enable manufacturing cells, planning cycles and warehouse lanes to function autonomously, lights-out operations also incorporate dark factories, touchless planning and autonomous warehousing.

To establish a broader framework for autonomous operations, organizations must implement policies, safety certifications and workflows that can be audited by machines or supervisory personnel. This requires standardized workflows and trusted data, expanding cell by cell, policy by policy and lane by lane for situations with lower variability. While human roles are limited, they still play a critical role in overseeing operations, governing, improving or handling exceptions while agents execute routine work.

What are the three domains of lights-out operations?

1. Autonomous planning eliminates the need for manual intervention in business planning and forecasting by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data analytics to streamline planning activities.
2. Autonomous warehousing utilizes robotics or warehouse management systems (WMS), with engineered mixed-mode safety rules and auditability, enabling workflows that touch on storage and movement to run without a human presence.
3. Dark factory manufacturing operations represent an advanced form of the lights-out approach, entailing production lines that are capable of unattended operation for a specified time, while relying on certified safety, inline quality telemetry and closed-loop control to maintain high standards. The system also provides the human team with kill switches, escalation paths and audit trails so they can intervene if necessary.

How can organizations build lights-out operations

As they move forward with deploying a lights-out operation within their supply chain, organizations can maximize value by following carefully crafted strategies that allow them to capitalize on automation, intelligence and autonomous practices. This approach would feature the following steps:

1. Assess current capabilities and needs: Conduct a gap analysis to identify areas ripe for automation. Organizations want to invest capital in the right areas and avoid overinvesting in areas that will not deliver a significant payoff.
2. Develop a strategic roadmap: Set clear objectives and allocate resources as necessary, starting with deciding on immediate and intermediate steps. One easy step some organizations might tackle is to create fulfillment centers that operate with minimal human intervention.
3. Build a cross-functional team: Maintain collaboration across the organization by involving IT, engineering and operations at the outset. This is a critical time to involve systems integrators who are experienced in following a blueprint that addresses all the needs of the organization.
4. Design and prototype solutions: Relying on digital twins and agile prototyping can help the organization test and refine solutions while minimizing risk and accelerating the implementation. Leveraging digital twins can help organizations determine the most effective way to move forward and provide a stronger base for later deployments.
5. Implement technology and infrastructure: By leveraging insights gained from prototyping, organizations can invest in the appropriate hardware and software that facilitate seamless integration, allowing them to fully utilize enterprise planning tools for enhanced operational efficiency and decision-making.

The human element cannot be overlooked. To be effective and safe, lights-out operations must establish clear rules and boundaries for when to involve humans or to continue operating without human intervention. In a human-in-the-loop system, people approve or execute key steps through each cycle, actively supervising autonomous functions. Conversely, in an out-of-the-loop system, processes operate without real-time human awareness, following tightly scoped activities. Humans can still review activities later via audit trails.

Preparing staff to work with advanced technologies and promoting a culture of continuous improvement will also help organizations successfully deploy autonomous operations. Given the potential for significant productivity gains, organizations need to consider a comprehensive plan for helping employees transition into more strategic roles that will realize major long-term benefits.

The shift toward lights-out operations represents a transformative opportunity for organizations to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and improve safety through automation and advanced technologies. But as companies in Asia move ahead at pace with the broad adoption of lights-out manufacturing, companies in the Americas and Europe need to begin ramping up their own efforts to embrace the lights-out imperative, not only as a way to advance innovative manufacturing practices, but also as a necessary step for finding a way to thrive and succeed in a rapidly changing, fiercely competitive global marketplace.