Industry 4.0 (4IR)

Industry 4.0 … Get ready for the future!

If you are a person who is in the business, engineering, or industry fields; you may have come across the term ‘Industry 4.0’ in various contexts.

But what exactly is Industry 4.0 and why is it gaining that increasing interest?

Let us start with the number ‘4’; why ‘4’? The number ‘four’ denotes the ‘fourth industrial revolution.

All of us know about the 1st industrial revolution which started near the end of the 18th C with the mechanization and the invention of steam engines.

The 2nd industrial revolution evolved with the rise of electrical energy in the second half of the 19th C that gave the factories the capacity for mass production.

It took another 100 years to move to the 3rd industrial revolution which was based on automation and electronics in the 1970s.

The rapid technological advances accelerated the fourth industrial revolution which started in the 2010s, widely known as ‘Industry 4.0’ which is based on networking, sensors, and the IoT.

It describes a vision of an ‘intelligently’ automated or smart factory in which labor, production system, products, and customers are connected.

The objective is to maximize the value creation across the value chain through continuous and autonomous knowledge, and the exchange of information and data.

The main areas of Industry 4.0 are:

• Predictive analytics: that uses data analytics to provide more accurate and responsive forecasts for demand and trends.
• Smart factories: Mainly in real-time monitoring and early detection of potential breakdowns.
• Warehousing: Smart stock monitoring and prevention of overstocking or understocking.
• Logistics: Sensors along the delivery chain make it possible to track shipments from the moment they leave the factory floor to the moment they arrive with the customer.

Some of the leaders in Industry 4.0 are Siemens, Bosch, Trumpf, Cisco, and General Electric.

However, the wheel is rolling fast and several factories and organizations around the world are initiating their smart factories.

The map Forbes.com gives the share of companies in the respective countries that have a smart factory initiative ongoing.

The map by Forbes.com gives the share of companies in the respective countries that have a smart factory initiative ongoing.

The survey below shows the implementation status across geographies (Forbes.com).

smart Factory implementation status across geographies

Sooner than you may think, Industry 4.0 will proliferate, and everyone in the business and engineering fields should get ready for it.

To get ready you need to gain knowledge about the different key technologies of ‘Industry 4.0’, which are shown in the figure below from colourbox.com :

Different key technologies of ‘Industry 4.0’

Gaining knowledge is just the start, but to be able to compete in this new era, you need to master at least one of those technologies.

• Digital Transformation.
• Workshop management
• Disaster Recovery – Planning Concepts
• Business Management systems

Thanks to the Internet.

Rich material is available through websites and online educational platforms that can give you the fundamentals of any of those technologies.