What is Smart Industry, and why is it important?

Smart Industry, also known as Industry 4.0, is a term for the digitization and automation of manufacturing. Technologies like artificial intelligence, data analytics, robotics, additive manufacturing, and others are significantly improving industrial processes and reducing our dependence on both human labor and decision making. Click here if you want to read more about the technologies.

By implementing the above mentioned technologies in current day manufacturing facilities, they can be converted to so-called smart factories. By using machine-to-machine communication and Industrial Internet of Things sensors, factories will be able to collect the valuable information, and monitor the production process with pinpoint precision. This information will then be used to optimize the production processes, maintenance routines,  supply chain, and help operators and engineers with data driven decision making.

Importance of Smart Industry

Before discussing Industry 4.0 any further, let’s first take a look at its importance, by looking at our current day manufacturing challenges. 

Workforce transformation

Baby boomers are nearing the end of their career and are close to retirement. This means that in the coming years, 30 - 50% of the workforce will retire, and not all of that experience and expertise can be replaced on such short notice (PWC & Mainnovation, 2017). The new generation that will fulfill these positions is a digital-native generation, who was raised by the internet, bringing lots of opportunities for the Industry 4.0 revolution and digitization of manufacturing. 

In the coming years, 30 - 50% of the workforce will retire, and not all of that experience and expertise can be replaced on such short notice!

Environmental drivers

The pressure on carbon footprint reduction and other emissions will continue, both from a government perspective and altruistic thought perspective. Green production processes are already a competitive advantage, and will become mandatory over the coming years. By the implementation of Industry 4.0, the compliance of these environmental friendly production processes can be validated

Cost pressure

While the world is changing rapidly, one thing will remain stable: the desire to do more with less. Keeping an eye on the bottom line is crucial for companies to stay competitive over the long run, and therefore the optimization of (manufacturing) through digitization is always welcome. 

Customizable products 

Consumers are increasingly interested in customized products for an affordable price with next day delivery. This brings enormous challenges and diversification for the manufacturing industry, not only to create the product but also to the corresponding supply chain. In this case, Industry 4.0 will enable facilities to produce with autonomous and self-adjusting production lines. 

Increased pace of changes

Our environment has always been changing, but the speed of the changes is significantly increasing. Agility, flexibility, and adaptability of the machines, processes and people are key for the competitiveness of a company over the coming years. 

The principles of Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is made possible by various branches of technology (Hermann et al., 2016). But they all generally fall under four overarching principles:

1. Interconnection
2. Information transparency
3. Technical assistance
4. Decentralized decisions

Interconnection (or interoperability)

A Human Machine Interface is a crucial part of Smart Industry. In order to make data driven decisions and reduce dependence on human labor, factories and industrial processes need a vast integration between the hardware, software, and employees involved in the (production) processes.

Information transparency

Traditional manufacturing is hindered by a lack of transparency into the (production) processes. The workforce has to exchange information and manually provide status updates. But during both the production, and supply chain processes, there are countless blindspots, where employees don’t have any access to the data they need to make decisions and improvements for the processes.

Smart manufacturing enables manufacturers to collect vast amounts of data at every step during the various processes. With this data, algorithms can support operators to identify problems, inefficiencies, and opportunities they simply weren't aware of before.

Technical assistance

Our workforce is imperfect and sometimes prone to error. Even with access to the right data, we can still misinterpret the data and make a poor decision. The machine learning aspect of Smart Industry enables devices and applications to scan and evaluate data in a much faster and more accurate manner than humans.

Industry 4.0 technology also supports employees with tasks that are difficult or unsafe. For example, augmented reality glasses support the vision of an engineer/ technician with other data sources. With the glasses, they could potentially look at a wall and let the glasses present a drawing of all the piping on top of that wall, making sure it’s safe to drill a hole. 

Decentralized decisions

In addition to supporting employees with decisions, Industry 4.0 enables machines to make simple, routine decisions on their own.

A production process that relies too heavily on manual decision-making will create a bottleneck, since every decision has to go through an employee, who can only make one decision at a time. Rushing these decisions may lead to mistakes, and machines armed with artificial intelligence can be configured to react to data with the same choices a human would make. This supports employees to focus on the situations that truly require their attention.

Smart Industry technologies

In the following article: click, we will elaborate on how Smart Industry works, and its core technologies that enable the implementation of manufacturing digitization, such as: data analysis &, Industrial Internet of Things, wearables, augmented reality, digital twins, cyber security and additive manufacturing.

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Credits main image: Industrial revolution vector created by jcomp