Industry 4.0: Making Manufacturing Digital
Behind the scenes of the world’s leading industrial and manufacturing companies, a profound digital transformation is now underway.
We are at the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution. The most commonly used terms to describe this development, which is rapidly changing the industrial landscape, are Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, the Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems and digital transformation.
Get Free Demo: Best ERP Software
The Industry 4.0 concept encompasses the digitization of the horizontal and vertical value chain, innovation in products and services and the creation of new business models. The key business drivers of this transformation include improving customer experience, increasing speed to market and reducing costs.
To reap the benefits of this revolution, leaders of industrial enterprises have Industry 4.0 at the top of their agenda. However, implementing an Industry 4.0 production environment will be an incremental journey over several years that will include modernizing legacy systems. Once undertaken, the possibilities of applying Industry 4.0 concepts and technology are unlimited.
MANUFACTURERS face changes on multiple fronts. Advanced manufacturing — in the form of additive manufacturing, advanced materials, smart, automated machines, and other technologies — is ushering in a new age of physical production.
At the same time, increased connectivity and ever more sophisticated data-gathering and analytics capabilities enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) have led to a shift toward an information-based economy.
With the IoT, data, in addition to physical objects, are a source of value — and connectivity makes it possible to build smarter supply chains, manufacturing processes, and even end-to end ecosystems
Our physical world has become hyper connected and is now rapidly being augmented with a layer of “smartness.” The fourth industrial revolution — like the ones that came before — is driven by new technologies
Industry 4.0 is enabled by technologies that integrate the digital and real worlds, such as:
- The Internet of Things (IoT): Connecting more and more systems, devices, sensors, assets and people through networks ranging from wireless, low-power wide-area networks to wired high-capacity networks
- Mobile solutions: Including smartphones, tablets, wearable sensors and smart glasses
- Cloud computing: Including low-cost processing and data storage solutions
- Cyber-physical systems (CPS): Monitoring and controlling physical processes using sensors, actuators and processors, based on digital models of the physical world
- Big data analytics and business intelligence: Turning data into actionable insights, which include early warning algorithms, predictive models, decision support, workflows and dashboards
- Advanced manufacturing technologies: Including robotics and 3D printing
New technologies have never been more abundant or affordable. At the same time, the capability to collect, distribute, share and analyze information to make decisions based on real time data and predictive analytics, and create new business value has improved considerably. This is evident from the significant drop in sensor, bandwidth and processing costs in the last 10 years.
Sensors, bandwidth and processing costs have dropped dramatically in the last decade:
Sensor prices have dropped to an average of 60 cents.
The cost of bandwidth has decreased by a factor of nearly 40 times.
Processing costs have declined almost 60 times.
Today, in the virtual world, new models can be used to simulate and analyze products and processes from the physical world. In product development, these models can be used for product optimization and to operate and control the manufacturing process. In business, these models can even be used to support business decisions.
Industry 4.0: What are the business benefits?
The possibilities of applying Industry 4.0 technology are unlimited.
A digitally-integrated and intelligent supply chain enables an unprecedented level of collaboration and real-time visibility across the supply chain to help address rising customer expectations
Imagine a real-time connected supply chain. What if all the participants in the supply chain shared data from their production sites, vehicles, warehouses and databases in real time? What if you used real-time points of sale and inventory data to understand the state of your business? Would you be better equipped to accommodate critical orders and meet customer expectations with faster, more accurate shipping and handling?
Imagine connected vehicles, containers and pallets. What if your company tracked and controlled the condition and location of your products throughout the supply chain? Would this help your company improve inventory management and product quality? Would serialization help your company deal with fraud and counterfeit products?
Imagine connected smart production equipment. What if equipment settings were self-adjusted based on materials used, products being made and other ambient conditions? Is your company able to customize mass-produced products based on the needs of an individual customer? What if equipment could be monitored remotely and malfunctions predicted accurately?
Imagine connected mobile and wearable devices. What additional functionalities and services would your company deliver to customers? How would you improve worker safety? Whatever your business, what if a fluid digital continuum could connect your departments, customers, suppliers, partners, production equipment and products throughout your product and services life cycles?
A digitally-integrated and intelligent value chain offers almost limitless possibilities. Industry 4.0 solutions improve operations efficiency, productivity, product quality, inventory management, asset utilization, time to market, agility, workplace safety and environmental sustainability.
Today, the most promising Industry 4.0 solutions are energy management and predictive maintenance, especially in combination with manufacturing execution systems (MES). This was visible at Hannover Messe, in April 2016, where condition monitoring, predictive maintenance and energy management were the most commonly shown use cases.
Industry 4.0: What are the challenges?
Industry 4.0 comes with challenges. Today, manufacturers deal with huge quantities of information, both structured and unstructured, which reside in databases that are not always properly connected. To create business value and meet customer expectations in terms of innovation, personalization and speed to market, it is necessary to connect these silos and enable a single, unbroken collection of data that is woven throughout the supply chain.
In order to achieve this, the following areas need to be addressed:
- Awareness: Many manufacturers are still unaware of the possibilities that Industry 4.0 technologies can offer and company-specific business cases do not demonstrate this suitably.
- People: Introducing new business models, business processes, and connected products and services will transform the way employees perform everyday tasks. In order to deploy Industry 4.0 solutions, companies need new people and skills. Certain jobs like those of industrial workers will change or might even become redundant. Warehouse workers, for instance, are expected to be replaced by autonomous robots. New roles, such as “robot coordinator” and “data scientist”, have been created, while routine and physically demanding jobs will disappear. Data scientists, for instance, collect and analyze data and apply their insights to improve manufacturing processes and products. Robot coordinators oversee robots on the shop floor, responding to malfunctions and carrying out maintenance tasks.
- Cybersecurity: With digital factories and a digitally-connected value chain, traditional IT security is not enough to protect the business. To overlook this reality is to compromise the stability and security of the company. As companies innovate, the “attack surface area” or the enterprise area that is vulnerable, gets bigger. The challenge lies in understanding the potential cyber risk that innovation brings. A single plant shut down can cause production losses of millions of dollars each day. Therefore, cybersecurity risks must be mitigated. Industrial IoT devices must be highly secure by design, and securely integrated into existing automation and information system architectures. Since breaches are inevitable, detection and response mechanisms have to be in place in the industrial control systems (ICS) area as well. This will build a necessary level of resilience for the company. In these circumstances, securing industrial control systems and ensuring cybersecurity cannot be understated. This can also help manufacturing organizations differentiate themselves from the competition.
- Investments: In order to implement Industry 4.0 solutions, considerable investments are required to create a robust and secure network infrastructure and upgrade or replace legacy systems. To justify these investments, benefits have to be unequivocally and reliably quantified.
- Collaboration: Today, no single vendor can deliver all the capabilities needed to implement Industry 4.0 solutions, as they are based on multiple technologies and devices that run on different networks. The delivery of Industry 4.0 solutions will be facilitated by an ecosystem of IT vendors, OT vendors, system integrators and emerging IoT startups. The critical success factor is close collaboration between the business, IT and OT.
- Standardization: Existing manufacturing standards are insufficient to fully enable Industry 4.0 and new technical, architectural and business standards are needed. As an increasing number of devices and systems that use proprietary communication protocols enter the market, data silos are formed, creating a complex network of connections between isolated data sources. Although multiple standardization bodies and industry consortia have published reference architectures and standards, there are no universal standards. This makes it tough for organizations to eliminate data silos. In fact, for years to come, the Industry 4.0 ecosystem will consist of multiple reference architectures, standards and protocols.
- IT modernization: Currently, industrial automation system deployments are a collection of proprietary technologies and networks. In the future, we will need to connect business planning and logistics solutions, manufacturing operations management solutions and industrial control systems, such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distributed control system (DCS), programmable logic controller (PLC) and human-machine interface (HMI). Processes will not be controlled by a standard programmable logic controller (PLC) anymore, but by a service-oriented, decentralized control system consisting of distributed microcontrollers that communicate using Internet standards. Already, hybrid IT environments combining cloud and traditional IT delivery models are on the rise, as cloud computing continues to emerge as a key enabler of both digital transformation and operational efficiency.
Industry 4.0: How will it impact the IT and OT?
Modernizing existing unconnected devices and systems will be critical to become more competitive.
Industry 4.0 enables shop floor (OT) and top floor (IT) integration by:
- Modernizing existing plants and assets by connecting existing IT and OT systems, sensors, devices, assets, products and materials with an IoT platform
- Creating new Industry 4.0 solutions that integrate data, people, workflows and legacy systems with solutions and services delivered via the cloud
The next step depends on your Industry 4.0 maturity level
The Industry 4.0 journey starts with the availability of data. Whether you are building new facilities or refurbishing an existing plant, production equipment, systems and sensors can generate large amounts of data on every aspect of the operation.
This data has to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed to unlock its business value for Industry 4.0 solutions. Deriving value from data largely depends on an organization’s capability to collect, manage and analyze data. Today, while sensors and production systems can generate massive volumes of data, making sense of this data flood requires strong data management, storage and high performance data analytics capabilities.
Conclusion
Industry 4.0 will change the entire manufacturing system, from the architecture and organizational structure to products, services and business models.
The development and deployment of these solutions will be incremental and part of a long-term trend, but the opportunity is already here today. Companies that fail to educate themselves on these new technologies and invest in pilot projects will lose their competitive advantage and miss the opportunity to lead the transformation that is currently sweeping across the manufacturing industry.
If you have not yet begun on this journey, you must start today
Originally White Paper Published at: https://www.cgi.com/sites/default/files/white-papers/manufacturing_industry-4_white-paper.pdf
Get onsite free access and demo on worlds top ERP software. Also Compare software features, read reviews and get best price quotes.