Industry 4.0 is a game-changer

Industry 4.0 has strongly marked the 4^th industrial revolution. It was a worldwide economy-changer where top 5 economies are leveraging the capabilities of the Industry 4.0 technologies to improve their ranking as the world’s largest manufactures.

Industry 4.0 facilitates the integration of fundamental improvements in the industrial processes, involved in manufacturing, engineering, supply chain and life cycle management, predictive maintenance and more.

Industry 4.0 is about analyzing and integrating total product and process life cycle, from partners, subcontractors to the end customer, so that everybody along the supply chain can communicate directly with manufacturing systems and personnel. This enables suppliers to better understand how their products and production operations are performing, and how customers’ needs, and desires evolve over time.

With such capability, the industry can be much more effective, efficient, and rapidly supply customers with a product that suits their needs and budget. Moreover, they can accurately predict and satisfy customer demand in our rapidly changing world.

The swift ramp-up of technologies ranging from smart warehouse robots to additive manufacturing to Industrial IoT to a new kind of predictive maintenance artificial intelligence-based software is more prevalent and sophisticated than ever before.

Before the 4th industrial revolution which was marked by the combination the real and the digital worlds in industry, infrastructure, mobility and healthcare, hereafter is a quick listing of previous industral revolions :

To wrap it up, Industry 4.0 has been a game changer in different ways:

• It makes the data colelction easy for process improvements, but more widely, to track back the path & materials footprint, all over the 3 GHG scopes, of all materials and operations. This helps outlining the roots of emissions, and hence, makes it easy to tackle and ready to disclose for ESG annual reports.

• It allowed engineers and decision-makers have, in a collaborative accessible tools, an overview of the different operations of their business and made processes improvement & clients management relationship easier than ever.

• It also enabled the connection between different industries and sectors and empowered new processes and collaboration between partners and clients.

Among others, here are some examples of how such capabilities can make industries much more effective:

1- Robotic inspection: Robots and vehicules equipped with IOT technology to ensure a continuous flux of work and supplies the different departments with the needed materials, it also ensures safety of materials as well as employees. Th robots are also used in an extremely secure way to do repetitve operations that previously are used by engineers. This increases the work security & performances.

2- Wireless sensors and conencted objects all along the production operations to store data (temperature, pressure, velocity...), display them in real-time for the different operators, and store it in the cloud to use it afterwards to develop new AI tools to predict all kind of issues for predictive maitenance purposes. All these daya will help increase the operations' quality and performances. It also assists engineers and stakeholder make suitable decisions in short time.

3- AR tools: Augmented reality is now used to digitally present the different procedures to guide the users all along the setting, maintenance or installation stages. It gives direct access to the different machine variables in the factory with a complete different level of documentation. Only filming the machine can give you all the needed information and history of the devices, pieces and equipments. An innovative way, among others, to help users despite their level of expertise, because we could have capitalize the intelligence and expertise of the factory experts to proactively assist and help others.

4- AI-based approaches can help companies adapt to rapidly changing markets and operational challenges. Simulations of different “what if” scenarios can help operators understand the impact of the outages.

5- Digital platforms to help you plan you predictive maintenance strategy and prevent any unplanned downtimes of production facilities and machines that cost you more than money: your reputation.

Looking at this examples, it is easy to recognize the value proposition of digitalization and the use of industry 40 technology, in the short term as well as the long term. It prevents you from unplanned downtimes of production facilities and machines.

The data presented here is taken from a presentation by SE at #HM17SE.

If you've been in the digital business for few time, you'll realize how fast the scale of operational systems, data storage and how systems can network together were limited. Now with nes capabilities (IOT systems, cloud based, new architectures..) we can go well beyond the limits of any previous capabilities to massive levels of implementation.