The buzzwords "Industrial Digitization" and "Industry 4.0" stand, simply said, for the networking of machines and processes with information and communication technologies that transmit and process large amounts of data at high speed.
Industry 4.0, intelligent manufacturing and the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are current trends that are critical to manufacturing growth and productivity. Industry 4.0 solutions signifies the fourth industrial revolution and is inherently a symbol of connectivity between things and people throughout the manufacturing process.
While the third industrial revolution focused on automation and introduced computer numerical control (CNC), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and manufacturing execution system (MES), the innovations of Industry 4.0 solutions revolve around keywords such as connected, real-time, integrated, modular, artificial intelligence, and smart manufacturing.
Smart manufacturing is the process of minimizing human interaction and only utilizing human brain power when it matters. Although some of the goals for Industry 4.0 solutions are quite ambitious, the hope is that it can evolve into artificial intelligence and automated decision-making, near perfect mechanical automation and symbiotic human integration, and have manufacturing facilities that are completely interconnected and ‘smart’, from raw materials to finished goods. While this change may seem overwhelming, it can be achieved by working incrementally, starting small by identifying pain points of facilities and scaling when success is shown.
In order to acclimate, firms today must “mesh with the cloud” and acquire a cohesive and informative understanding of their processes. Though the advance towards Industry 4.0 is within manufacturing, it affects the world as a whole. The improvement of quality, timing and cost of manufacturing greatly influences industries in food and medicine, electronics and gadgets, as well as preserving limited resources and in turn impacting the environment we all live in.
Manufacturers are able to make strides toward Industry 4.0 solutions through three pillars of thought: digitization, sensorization and optimization.
Digitization
Before sensorization and optimization can occur, existing operations must be digitized to provide visibility over everything as it happens in real time. This allows faults and detection of issues in real time. Digitizing workflows allows labor and products to be monitored and actioned on immediately.
Delays cost time and money, and digitization helps eliminate this by providing immediate alerts and notifications when operations go contrary to schedule. It also creates a treasure trove of data that can be used to optimize operations. It allows for the building of true cost models and enables manufacturers to focus on areas of inefficiencies and productivity improvement.
Sensorization
The first step towards machine inter-connectivity, is sensorization. This eliminates human monitoring and frees up resources for more critical areas. Sensors are cost-effective ways to measure variables such as temperature, moisture, air quality, motion and vibration, among others. This enables equipment to auto-detect issues, which leads to auto-triggers and auto-configurations from a software and hardware perspective.
Optimization of data In Industries
Amidst all the data collected from digitization and integration, transitioning this data into finding the hidden gems is the next priority. Optimization of manufacturing data comes through analytics, simulation, predictive and preventative maintenance, etc. Ultimately, the goal is to reduce costs and improve quality.
The improvement and automation of technology doesn’t require a complete removal of humans from the process; it’s quite the contrary. Unique facilities require unique analytics and toolsets. This creates opportunities for industrial engineers, data scientists, manufacturing engineers, and statisticians, and requires a new breed of data-driven manufacturing experts to derive improvements and optimization.
Working together
The next big leaps in Industry 4.0 solutions require cooperation and compromise. The biggest roadblock to proper Industry 4.0 implementation is our ability for machines and devices to work together and share data. The hope is that this can be avoided through standardization of machine-to-machine communication, IIoT communication and hopefully software database and communication protocols for MPR, ERP, MES, etc. Once this is achieved, we can then see manufacturing turn into a fully modular and interchangeable set of software and hardware.
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