If you are one of the manufacturers whose primary focus is on a product, it is the right time to reassess your strategies and bring the light on your customers.
Big names in the manufacturers predict and plan for their customers’ future needs. And for that, credit goes to Digitalization.
Digitization is all about using digital technologies to transform a business model, deliver new revenue and value, and leverage more opportunities.
Smart Manufacturing
Fourth Industrial Revolution – Industry 4.0 introduces the terms “Smart Factory” and “Smart Manufacturing.”
Smart Manufacturing is all about completely integrated, collaborative manufacturing systems that respond in real-time. It helps to address emerging needs and conditions in the Smart factories, rapid design changes, flexible workforce training, supply chain networks, high-level adaptability, and customer demands.
Smart Manufacturing combines advanced technologies such as AI, Robotics, IIoT, cybersecurity, Blockchain, Big data analytics, etc.
After entering the era of Industry 4.0, the Smart industry comprises a multiscale simulation, interoperable systems, networked sensors, multiscale dynamic modeling, and intelligent automation. All these parameters are considered Smart manufacturing capabilities.
Computers and automation work together in a completely new way. Robotics are connected remotely to different computer systems integrated with Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. It learns and manages Robotics with zero to very little input from human operators.
In Smart factories, cyber-physical systems track the factory’s physical processes and make decentralized decisions. The Physical systems turn into IoT, collaborating and cooperating with each other and with humans in real-time through the wireless Web.
Types of Smart Manufacturing Systems
Smart manufacturing prevails in one of the three categories mentioned below.
- Product and Control Solution that includes smart manufacturing means the creation of automation products and services.
- IT Solutions comprises the ways IoT can be utilized in manufacturing processes. It will aid with asset management, support in control, tracking, and analytical infrastructures.
- Connectivity Solutions where telecom service providers aid to make a smooth, hassle-free data flow for asset management.
Key drivers of Smart Manufacturing
Digitization and Integration of Value Chains
The fourth industrial revolution incorporates processes vertically across the whole organization. It adds processes in product development, structuring, and service. Industry 4.0 horizontally adds in-house processes from suppliers to customers along with all the value chain partners.
Digital Product and Services
Integration of new data collection and analysis approaches like new digitized product development via existing product expansion help organizations to make data on product usage to enhance the products.
Digitization of Business Models and Customer Access
Customer satisfaction is incessant. Multi-stage procedures that need real-time changes to adapt to the evolving customer requirements.
Technologies that Drive Changes
The simplest way to understand Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing is to understand the technologies that are driving changes.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI defines computer systems that can think just like humans. They determine complex patterns, process data, make conclusions, and offer more personalized recommendations. AI is used for pattern detection in loads of unstructured data to power the auto-correct on your smartphone.
Blockchain
It is a highly secure, more transparent, and decentralized approach to recording and sharing data, without any third-party intermediaries. Blockchain technology makes supply chains more traceable, safeguarding confidential medical details anonymously, and combating voter scams.
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)
VR provides compelling digital experiences by using a VR headset that replicates the real world. AR merges the digital and actual world. It allows users to digitally experiment with products before purchasing.
Biotechnology
It leverages cellular and biomolecular procedures to build new technologies and products for multiple uses. It develops fresh pharmaceuticals and materials, enables efficient industrial manufacturing, and provides cleaner energy sources.
Robotics
Robotics is all about the designing, manufacturing, and use of robots for commercial activities. Modern technologies have made robots highly sophisticated. They are used in the fields of manufacturing for workers’ safety and work as a human assistant.
IoT
Manufacturing organizations can gather customers’ details from continually connected products. It enables them to better evaluate customer behavior for the products and customize marketing campaigns based on that analysis.
3D Printing
It enables manufacturing organizations to print their parts by using fewer tools at an affordable cost, and speedier compared to old school processes. Additionally, 3D printing allows the customized design to ensure a perfect fit.
Components of Industry 4.0
The Industry 4.0 application performs through,
- Smartphones
- Location detection technologies
- IoT platforms
- Authentication and fraud detection
- Modern human-machine interfaces
- Big analytics and modern processes
- Smart sensors
- AR/Wearables
- Multilevel customer interaction and customer profiling
- On-demand system resource availability
Business Benefits of Smart Manufacturing
More Productivity and Improved Efficiency
Having an idea about the plant performance and analysis of intelligent data enables reduced downtime and utmost plant productivity with highly efficient planning and quick preventive maintenance.
Flexibility
Smart manufacturing helps with a quick adaptation of customers’ changing needs, mitigates operational expenditures, and gets more possibilities with new business verticals. Smart systems provide different manufacturing environments and production processes and thus manage different operational tasks. Modern sensors automatically determine variations in manufacturing demand and provide a quick response to the supply chain.
Better Work Life
Smart factories can not be progressed with just full automation by robots. Human input is essential to do jobs that need a reasoning brain. It will enhance human work-life in production facilities, mitigate ordinary tasks, and open up new job opportunities.
Safety of Workers
Collecting detailed data of workers, machines, and companies to generate an all-inclusive data set provides overall safety and productivity with intelligent automation.
Cost Reductions
Determining wastage and improving forecast precision helps to connect operations and smart enterprise systems can reduce costs. Industry 4.0 also offers improved insight into asset levels, delivery status, and demand cycles, mitigating the cost of extra assets.
Summing Up
This intelligent manufacturing is not the future but a reality in today’s world. It will consistently keep evolving in the coming future by bringing in innovation, smartness, and efficiency.
In the coming decades, it is up to the industries to keep the innovations on track to benefit the real world. It aids to shape the automated future and generate opportunities for millions of individuals.
