Articles
Richard Welford, chief strategy and marketing officer, Tata Technologies
The vision of Industry 4.0 is a good one. There’s the prospect of the mass-production of personalised products, machines talking to each other, tracking the usage of your products, and creating more efficiency in systems and processes. These are all great aims.
But Industry 4.0 has been played up to become a kind of technological utopia for manufacturing. It’s become a task of scary proportions that requires a significant technical leap, with the associated cost.
The hype is considerable and, given the potential complexity of Industry 4.0, the idea of how it should be adopted becomes increasingly difficult to understand.
There is a very real risk that the hype will alienate potential adopters from embracing this change. But the consequences for late movers could be devastating!
A good manufacturer should have lots of strategies to improve the business: a technology strategy, a strategy for globally distributed manufacturing, a strategy for leveraging digital and advanced manufacturing techniques, and so on.
A lot of what Industry 4.0 promises is available here and now. We’ve been helping companies achieve similar things for more than 10 years, just by understanding where they want to go, and providing a strategy of upgrades born of practicalities. If you think of it more as Industry 3.x, rather than 4.0, suddenly the concepts become much more accessible.
The impact of “big data” means that increasingly everything will have a level of data associated with it. The way you run your business has to evolve or you will fall behind. Our approach for dealing with that is the data backbone strategy.
Product development and product “realisation” has become an end-to-end digital lifecycle. At the core of modern manufacturing therefore is a digital backbone, connecting the manufacturing domain to the upstream and downstream extended enterprise, capturing manufacturing data, analysing and learning from it, and creating closed-loop feedback for continuous improvement across the business.
This digital backbone enables collaboration and distribution outside the traditional enterprise, into a global value system. It provides the foundation for digital manufacturing, and for the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies. By embracing collaborative, concurrent engineering, manufacturers can avoid costly errors, improve cost and quality, and accelerate time to market.
The data backbone runs outwards from core product engineering, through the processes and systems used to create products, and into connected enterprise IT, including ERP, MES, SCM, DMS and CRM (or CXM). In many cases our clients have already deployed these technologies. Unfortunately, many have isolated deployment, resulting in data discontinuities – they don’t talk to each other as well as they should. By helping them understand their target architecture and choosing to use data in a continuous way – by plugging those data discontinuities – we can create value.
So look at your business objectives and apply the technology in a way that fulfils them. It doesn’t have to be a new technological journey, a 4.0. Look at the technology in the context of your business. The technology should be the enabler, not the destination.