IF YOU MANUFACTURE CUSTOMIZABLE GOODS, THESE INDUSTRY 4.0 TECHNOLOGIES ARE FOR YOU!
The internet has completely changed every sector imaginable: business, education, government, healthcare, media, entertainment, and even the way humans interact with each other! The rate of innovation has been nothing short of revolutionary. And while most of the people assume that manufacturing has faced a similar transformation, they’d be pretty wrong.
In fact, GDP growth has been declining for the past 50 years now. The productivity in manufacturing is now witnessing a stagnation. We have moved our factories offshore, made them considerably bigger and also streamlined their operations, but walk on the average production floor today, and you will be surprised by how little has changed over these five decades. Just a meagre 8% of the manufacturing processes have automation today.
Throughout history, huge leaps in the GDP growth have resulted in magnificent advances in the area of manufacturing. The First Industrial Revolution witnessed steam and water power for the very first time; the Second, the rise of mass production; the Third, in the 1970s, saw the emergence of electronics; and we are now witnessing the arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, that is also known as Industry 4.0, where interconnectivity, automation, machine learning, Big Data and AI are expected to take productivity to unimaginable heights in the future.
Below, we will be taking a closer and in-depth look at the best Industry 4.0 technologies — that are revolutionizing the manufacturing process for the fourth time now. We pay a lot of attention to the manufacturers of customized goods, explaining in detail about how they can tap into Industry 4.0 technologies right now!
We explore each and every technology in isolation, where they should be conceptualized as an interconnected whole — a cyber-physical network. Together these technologies create the “smart factory” — a highly flexible system that’s connected to a global network of other systems and supply networks that optimizes, adapts, and runs autonomously in a sophisticated information value loop.
Instances of Industry 4.0 Technologies
- Automated Robotics
Robots have been an integral part of manufacturing for decades, but not like this. Under Industry 4.0, this new generation of autonomous robots are going to work with one another. With humans to carry out an array of non-repetitive tasks, this will allow the manufacturers to produce customized products for similar unit costs as massive runs of thousands.
- 3D Printing, Or, Additive Manufacturing
Often called “3D printing”, additive manufacturing is a CAD-controlled process that allows three-dimensional objects to be created by depositing and joining materials, usually in a layered format. With additive manufacturing, the differential cost between the batches of one unit or thousand units is negligible, allowing for the rapid creation of light,and customized goods. Additive manufacturing technology has already made huge inroads into transformed plastics’ production, and now it’s also doing the same for metals.
- Integration- Both Horizontal & Vertical
Under Industry 4.0, companies,supply chains, functions and even entire industries are integrated with universal data networks. Smart supply chains, smarter logistics, and new taxation models (who should pay the tax when goods are printed across continents rather than shipped?) are integrated horizontally. Business functions like sales, marketing, engineering, QA, product management, and IT get vertically integrated.
- Cloud
Such levels of horizontal and vertical integration call for rapid data sharing across companies, sites, and systems, all of which gets done in the Cloud. 5G promises much more enhanced speed, efficiency, and performance with peak data transfer rates of 20 Gbps.
- The Backing of Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity takes on even greater importance when a number of sensitive data lives in the Cloud. New Industry 4.0 security solutions are rapidly being introduced to mitigate the known threats and also learn to identify the newer ones.
- Augmented Reality(AR) For Industries
AR allows their workers and buyers access to digital information and then puts it onto the physical world. It supports the various manufacturing tasks, from the selection of parts in a warehouse to the assembly of products on the shop floor, letting the workers receive information in real-time, enhancing their decision making and productivity.
- Virtual Reality (VR)
VR gives manufacturers the ability to simulate and optimize their machines, products, and humans under a variety of potential scenarios before real-world, physical changeovers. Quality and productivity can easily be maximized without any risk of downtime or even product recalls.
- Not Just IoT, IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things)
IIoT uses a network of sensors that are embedded into machines, products, packaging and even people to collect crucial production data. Manufacturers can further identify these bottlenecks, failures, and quality issues before they actually happen. They can optimize the inventory management, enhance the safety, predict the machine failures and their degradation, reduce machine downtime, and ultimately lead to an increase in the overall efficiency.
- Big Data & Related Analytics
Big Data essentially refers to the collection and quick, efficient analysis of data gathered from production equipment, systems, enterprise-customer databases, and a number of other numerous sources. The data pool is so huge and growing so fast that it is more than the capacity of standard tools used for the collection, storage, management, and their analysis. Machine learning uses this very data to determine the patterns, predict their future outcomes and trends, teaching itself, and getting highly effective to greater degrees over time.
How can these Industry 4.0 Technologies Used by Manufacturers of Customizable Goods?
Industry 4.0 technologies are bringing in growth in the overall productivity and several other large-scale macroeconomic shifts: Factories are now relocating back to their home markets and getting smaller and much more agile; trade flows between China and the US are now being replaced by cleaner, increasingly efficient regional manufacturing; new and intelligent machines are now producing a huge range of products without retooling needs and small production runs, even some batches of a single unit, are becoming economically feasible.
Manufacturers can now provide a lot of customization at scale, offering immense values to the buyers who can get customized products to their exact requirements and buy them in smaller quantities. But this then presents a fundamental challenge to the manufacturers: how to configure the right products, at the right price for every customer, when there are thousands of complicated options to choose from?
Visual CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) is an amazing solution that allows the manufacturers to reap the benefits of flexibility of the Industry 4.0 technologies while also providing the best possible customer experience. Using an inbuilt visual product configurator, sales reps and even the customers themselves can follow different on-screen instructions to configure the products visually. Product and pricing logic that gets programmed into the backend ensures that every product is perfectly optimized from a technical and profitability perspective.
With visual product configuration, users can simply point, click, drag and drop inside a visual interface to add or remove parts, resize their sections, and even bring about an upgrade in the features. As they make these changes, a visual representation of the product gets updated in real-time. Solutions like KBMax can integrate the AR and VR technologies into the product configuration process, providing a highly immersive experience that’s accessible to all kinds of businesses. KBMax CPQ lives in the cloud (SaaS) so that it can be accessed from anywhere, through any device, and flawlessly gets integrated into multiple internal and external data networks.
Once product configuration has been decided upon, CPQ uses Big data and Machine Learning to calculate the optimized prices before automatically generating a range of quotes and proposals. This frees the sales reps from the responsibility of number crunching and formatting, leaving with more time to do what they do best — sell! KBMax takes automation a giant step further, bringing in the generation of engineering and production data as well. CAD files, workflows, BOMs, and cut sheets get created without any sort of an engineering input and then get transferred to the relevant teams and machines,from autonomous robots, 3D printers, or even CNC.
