A car factory in the downtown of a Baroque European city sounds like an awful idea. That is exactly what Dresdenites thought when Volkswagen proposed the idea of opening one in their beautiful city. But when Volkswagen actually opened the factory in 2002, it took everyone by surprise. It delighted the city-dwellers and started attracting tourists from around the world, thus becoming one of the city’s top-visited places. This is an odd thing to expect from a factory, something that most people would imagine as an ugly, dirty, and noisy inhumane place like this:
The man behind this unexpected success was architect Gunter Henn, an author of such extraordinary new urban building concepts as China Life Tower and Commercial Bank of Ethiopia. Together with Volkswagen, they re-imagined what a factory should be and what it can be, with all the new technologies available for them. Thus Gläserne Manufaktur, or a Transparent factory, was born, a clever word play conveying idea of both optical transparency and the transparent production process.
But it is not only the awe-inspiring art-gallery feeling that makes this factory special — it also re-invention of the whole assembly floor. There are thousands of magnets embedded in the floor that work as a roadmap for the robotic sledge. The sledge is packed with automotive parts that automatically go to appropriate places in the assembly hall. The conveyor belt is built into the floor too and it moves in a big loop around the factory. The floor’s induction powers the tools that engineers use, so no need for long wires and sockets everywhere. Moreover, at every assembly station, each car part is tracked by a computer, to make sure it is ready to go to the next station.
The whole thing worked perfectly as a marketing gimmick for the luxury sedan Phaeton made there. But the VW Gläserne Manufaktur is not just an outlier factory, it is an early example of a tectonic shift happening in the manufacturing business neatly summed up in one trendy word — Industry 4.0.
Industry 4.0 — behind the buzzword
Unlike the consumer market, traditional industries and big corporations run on “better safe than sorry” logic and change very slowly. That’s why NASA is still using many devices developed for the Apollo mission and your local Medicare center registrar uses clunky desktop computers with DOS, while she plays Candy Crush on the latest iPad. Changes in big companies are very expensive and, in most cases, the delay is justified.
It takes some time for different technologies to come together like pieces of a puzzle to reveal the big picture. For example, using smart home devices with an app is a lot less hassle than having a remote control for each. But it was not possible before the iPhone. Convergence of technologies makes them more powerful and versatile.
Now, we are witnessing the convergence of information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT), and the physical and digital come together to produce what is called the Smart Factory. These are some of the puzzle pieces behind the shift:
Robotics >> Fully Integrated Industry
Robots on the factory floor is old news. But when you add sensors and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication to the mix — something new emerges. The system works like this:
- Sensors track data points from many parts of the machinery;
- The data is then fed to the intelligent analysis tools (a Device-to-Business or D2B model);
- The system analyzes data and helps to make decisions;
- Information and decisions are synchronized through the cloud, so every part of the business is on the same page.
This process creates a self-perpetuating e-maintenance system with an ever growing decision-making support knowledge base. It enables the factory to be automatized with robots making effective and fast decisions for themselves. And this leads to a greater nero-zero downtime factory with near-zero error and near-zero need for human intervention.
Big Data >> Systems of Intelligence
When you hear the words Big Data, it gives many people (well, at least me) this queasy feeling in the stomach: Yeah, that’s what we need — even MORE data. Information Abundance, or Information Overload, no matter how you want to put it, is a real problem. But gathering data is just a first step. The next step is creating data-driven intelligence systems that make use of it.
Big Data is the fuel for the intelligent analysis tool mentioned in the previous point. The more data this system collects, the more intelligent it becomes. Here we enter into the topic of AI — another puzzle piece in the mix that will play a big role in the Smart Factories of the future.
Microsoft is one of the movers of the Industry 4.0 already working with big corporations likeJabil and Rolls-Royce. Jabil is digitizing the factory floor and Rolls-Royce is smartifying their jet engine equipment. They actually displayed the latest Trent series engine in the Hannover Messe 2016, a world’s leading industrial fair in Germany.
According to the company, it is the world’s most fuel efficient engine, generating 97,000 pounds of thrust and billions of data points. The data is gathered into the Azure IoT Suite system and analyzed to make better decisions. And, to get back to the AI topic, Microsoft’s Cortana is a part of this Suite as well. (Watch video from the event)
Big Gap Between Manufacturer and Customers >> Flattening of the Supply Chain
When most manufacturing went off-shore, a factory in the consumer’s mind became a vague notion (thus, the reluctance to update the archetypal factory image from the peak of the industrial age). Meanwhile, most of the manufacturers have no desire to deal with consumers. The majority of consumer products are made in a OEM/ODM fashion, when factory makes a “white label” device and allows other companies to brand it and bring it to customers.
But digital tools like e-commerce, crowdfunding (like collaboration between Indiegogo and and Arrow Electronics), live-feed video (like in Haier’s concept of Transparent factory), and all-encompassing ecosystems (like Autodesk’s Forge Initiative) are rapidly bridging this gap. While the direct Factory-to-Customer model like Volkswagen implemented in Dresden, might not be the path that most manufacturers will take, the supply chain flattening trend is real.
Automated production, online real-life monitoring, cloud-based collaboration tools, and smart logistics are cutting out a lot of third-party services. That is why the supply chain needs to keep up and bridge the gap left by the quickly evolving industry.
While industries are out of breath trying to keep up with the pace of innovation, some outliers are already planning the Industry 5.0, which, according to Jeff Bezos, will be in space, but that’s a whole other story.
Originally published at blog.hwtrek.com on July 5, 2016.
