Industry 4.0 smart factories? An unrealistic outlook for many companies for the next 10 years
Aart Willem de Wolf
Published at
Lately, there has been published a lot about Industry 4.0, suggesting this is a nearby future. Certainly, from a technological perspective it might be. Recent studies show most technological requirements for a 4.0 smart plant are already available on the market. But plants are not just technology. They are organisations connected to other organisations in a chain. Places where people work with certain capabilities, where decisions are taken on each organization level. At plants process execution is not predictable and investment budgets are constrained. So, to get to an Industry 4.0 smart plant, you will have to overcome some challenging obstacles. In this blog I will review three of them.
So, what are the key-challenges to get to a smart plant?
Capabilities of your processes
It is great to put automation and digitization to work. A core prerequisite is that your processes are stable and predictable. Not only proven by your weekly aggregated KPIs that are typically disconnecting you from physical reality. No, proven on a daily, shift or even hourly or minute basis. Measured by data straight from the physical execution processes. Each data point is then compared to their performance standard. If you hit this standard every time, your process is stable and predictable. This is a great starting point for connecting assets to smart networks in your plants.
Capabilities of your people
In Industry 4.0, you will need different and new human capabilities. It will definitely be more IT and data driven. But not only that. How well developed are the big data capabilities of your employees? We observe that even for stock-listed industrial companies this is an area that typically is seriously underdeveloped. Yes,they know how to create databases, implement new manufacturing systems. But creating cross-functional databases, taking a variance-based view and building able to create useful insights for operations is a totally different game. A game not well played by many.
Use of data
Yes, Industry 4.0 is about automation and IT driven changes. This certainly has happened or is taking place. But ask yourself: have you taken true benefit of all the data you’ve collected since then? Do you know the quality of this data? Are you using it on a granular basis for daily evaluation of your production performance? Companies typically only use 10–20% of the available data to learn and to improve. Studies show productivity gains of more than 15% are expected. But why wait if you can already gain these levels of productivity by using your current data in a new refreshing way?
Next to these challenges, there are many other technology related challenges as well. But before putting all your investment money into new technologies, why don’t you create more value with today’s asset? It will certainly help you to generate cash for Industry 4.0 investments.
Aart Willem de Wolf is Managing Partner at R&G Global Consultants in The Netherlands
https://rnggcna.com/big-data-services/
