When people talk about Industry 4.0 they often pull out a timeline showing the first three industrial revolutions from the steam engine to assembly lines to computing. The fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, naturally follows.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has summarized nine technologies that are enabling Industry 4.0 at the Dassault Systèmes Manufacturing in the Age of Experience event in Shanghai. BCG’s Moundir Rachidi says that companies adopting these technologies can experience a revolutionary increase in productivity.





Nine technology advances comprising Industry 4.0. (Image courtesy of BCG.)

Rachidi predicts, as consultants frequently do, dire consequences for companies who either

a) are too slow to embrace these new technologies, or

b) rush blindly forward

He further points out that the biggest gains will come to those who move forward with all of these technologies, as they are complementary in many ways.





BCG’s Nine Enabling Technologies for Industry 4.0





1. Autonomous robots

The new wave of robots are not the single-task beasts of yesteryear. Today’s collaborative robots, or cobots as they are known, can work in partnership with human workers without risk of injury. They are easy to train and can do a wide range of tasks. It seems every major robotics manufacturer has introduced a new collaborative robot in the past 12 months.





Humans train Baxter for a variety of tasks on the factory floor. (Image courtesy Rethink Robotics)





One of the better known cobots, Baxter from Rethink Robotics, has a list price starting at $25,000. According to Vlad Lukic, Managing Director at BCG, the costs of autonomous robots have fallen dramatically as their functionality has improved, “Our clients have seen price decreases in the range of 10-20% per year over the last five years, with similar annual improvements in productivity.” That comes out to a doubling in performance at half the cost since 2011. Many would say that Vlad’s estimate is too conservative.

Future collaborative robots are expected to work with each other autonomously, enabling another level of productivity enhancements.





2. Industrial internet of things

The falling price of sensors and the ability to connect them easily to the Internet is helping machinery vendors to economically bring fully instrumented products to their customers. Once networked together, the industrial internet allows manufacturers to measure multiple processes at once. This enables a feedback loop to help operators control the factory floor, and even the supply chain, as a system rather than as a collection of individual machines.

Consider the example of Embraco, a compressor manufacturer. They had an issue with the volume of rework that was required in their factories, so they wanted to collect operating data to pinpoint the issues. However, many of their machines were old, dating from the mid 1970s. That left them to collect operating data manually, which limited the amount of data they could collect and how fast they could analyze it. In 2015 they decided to instrument their old machines and collect the data automatically.

When Embraco accumulated the data in their manufacturing enterprise system, Dassault Systèmes Apriso, they identified a number of process improvements to make. According to Luciano Borges Lopes, Corporate IT Manager at Embraco, their analysis after networking their machines helped them decrease their rework costs by more than 50%.





3. Big data and analytics

Instrumenting machines can lead to valuable insights about output, errors and energy and material consumption. All of that machine data can be overwhelming to analyze. Most companies who are successful with IoT use some level of abstraction of the data so that they can report on exceptions and draw attention to them right away.

There are many companies developing solutions for analyzing big data including,

i) hardware devices that monitor machines locally and process the data before pushing exception or summary data to a central database, and

ii) software that collects data from virtually any kind of sensor and allows users to analyze the data or set exception limits for operating performance.





4. Simulation of processes, not just products

Simulation is known to save time and money during a product’s development process. However, the ability to simulate the manufacturing process is not nearly as widely known nor used. Simulation of the product and process together is a concept referred to as a digital twin.









Simulation of processes allows “what-if” analysis that can lead to tremendous productivity gains. According to Bongsik Kim, Digital Manufacturing Specialist at Doosan Infracore, Doosan had a problem with too many engineering changes following production launches. The company implemented virtual processes using elements of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform from Dassault Systemes, resulting in a 47% decrease in engineering changes after product launches.

Simulation is an area where software developers are ahead of their customers in many ways. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform includes materials properties and analysis tools that can analyze and simulate materials at an atomic level along with other tools that facilitate analysis at the part, assembly, system and “system of systems” levels. No manufacturers are as yet actually using all of these simulation capabilities.





5. Additive manufacturing

Local Motors has announced plans to 3D print custom cars for retail sale by 2018. That sounds like a dream and may not be relevant to most manufacturers. For most, the nearer term promise for additive manufacturing is in the areas where it has already proven so useful – product prototypes, jigs and fixtures, and manufacturing low volume, high value parts.

BCG’s Lukic agrees, saying, “3D printing does not support manufacturing at scale except for dental and medical applications where the customer will pay the extra cost. The opportunities to use additive manufacturing to make large runs of products will be limited for the foreseeable future by speed, cost, and the range of available materials.”





6. Augmented reality and Virtual Reality

Augmented reality (AR) allows users to see instructions overlaid on a real environment, whether through a tablet or through a set of glasses. In certain applications, AR can cut training time for activities such as assembly to almost zero. Caterpillar recently demonstrated a maintenance operation using a tablet with data-driven information overlaid on a generator. In the demonstration, an operator was able to follow service instructions which showed a model of the correct part placement overlaid on the actual generator.





A Caterpillar repair technician uses an iPad with AR to see instructions generated overlaid on a generator





The general availability of highly functional and low cost computer tablets and wearable glasses are making AR economically viable in a wider range of manufacturing applications. For example, a factory worker can economically use a Hololens or HTC Vive to learn an assembly process faster and with fewer defects than by using a training manual.

Future applications may include pushing real-time information to workers on a factory floor to improve their decision making without them having to seek that data.

Virtual Reality (VR) is different than AR in that VR is an immersive experience. The user does not see data overlaid on reality, but rather a fully computer generated environment. When it comes to VR, BCG’s Lukic sees additional opportunities, “We use VR when training executives, and for sharing large scale models, such as walking through a virtual factory before it is built.”

Virtual Reality for factory tours and process design were formerly the domain of expensive dedicated rooms, or “caves”, set up exclusively for that purpose. The falling costs of computing and VR glasses, combined with a rush of new applications from major technology inventors such as PTC and Dassault Systemes, appear set to make AR and VR available to a much broader range of product developers and manufacturers in the near future.





7. Horizontal and vertical data integration

Most of the systems in today’s manufacturing facilities are not fully integrated. Silos of information separate sales from production, procurement from accounting, and executives from almost everyone. Industry 4.0 promises to break down these horizontal silos within companies by creating a single source of the truth for manufacturing. Unfortunately, getting to that single source of the truth often requires a manufacturer to migrate all of their processes to a single vendor solution, such as SAP. Many companies aren’t comfortable with such reliance on a single vendor, but the value of tight integration is so high that many companies will be forced down this path.

Supply chains can gain similar advantages by vertically integrating their data flows across companies, but they will need to overcome even greater political challenges to integrating their data. An entire supply chain is unlikely to agree to a common vendor for all of their internal systems. That said, there have been precedents within the aircraft industry and even within the construction industry. Construction project managers on large projects, for example, often share a single building information model with architects, engineers, planners and tradespeople.





8. Cloud

The Cloud is a core enabling technology for Industry 4.0. It is only on the Cloud that most companies will ever get access to the bursts of computing power that they need to create and analyze a full digital twin simulation. It is the Cloud that enables the data transfer capabilities for the IIoT, and the data analysis capacity for big data.

This is still early days, but the Cloud has so far lived up to expectations for expandable computing on-demand and for transmission speed. As transmission speeds improve, it may be possible to deploy machine data and functionality fully in the Cloud.





9. Cybersecurity

One of the downsides of embracing a data-driven manufacturing strategy is the risk of cyber attack. The distributed denial of service attack on Oct 21, 2016 that affected large parts of the U.S and Europe and disrupted many major websites, came from compromised IoT devices. This risk has a lot of manufacturers reflecting carefully on their plans for enabling their devices for the IoT.





A map of the regions hit hardest by the DDOS attack on Oct. 21, 2016. (Image courtesy of downdetector.com.)





Although the IIoT can create a lot of entry points for hackers, manufacturers need not be totally secure to get started. According to Lukic, “Our clients are not seeing security as a deal-breaker for their Industry 4.0 plans. There are certain elements of data that must be protected at all costs, but for the rest, it makes sense to do a cost/benefit analysis of different levels of security.”

Lukic believes that companies will accept a known risk of hacking if the upside of transmitting that data is sufficiently high. He points out that these risks can be revisited when the cost of protection falls. “There are major advances happening in security software and techniques, so it may be reasonable to accept a risk today with the expectation that it may be economically addressed in the near future.”





The ugly children of Industry 4.0

Like any new initiatives that are enabled by technology, early adopters will face some considerable risks. Rushing blindly into a marriage of Industry 4.0 and PLM can lead to many negative outcomes. Here are a few ways that manufacturers can go wrong:

Implementing technology ahead of processes, a prescription for pain in any initiative to improve processes

Defining a strategy from the bottom up, or the top down, rather than both. Either of these singular perspectives can lead to a loss of the vital integration opportunities that are necessary to make the most of these advances

Moving forward without hiring the data analytic, cybersecurity or programming skills your organization will need. Success with these new technologies will almost certainly demand that you add new members to your team.

The promise of Industry 4.0 is attracting investment

Manufacturers are aggressively exploring the boundaries of Industry 4.0 today thanks to:

i. declining prices of all the technologies, including sensors, cobots and AR / VR

ii. availability of highly integrated software for the entire product realization process

iii. increasing comfort with storing and processing data on the cloud

iv. last, but not least, the demands of customers for mass customization

Mr Kim, for example, dreams of a fully autonomous factory for Doosan, just like an autonomous car. He recognizes that getting there will require actively gathering data from the factory floor to know precisely what is going on. And it will require the ability to simulate an improved environment through a digital twin in real time to see how changes will improve the production flow.

In this vision of the future, consumers around the world will benefit from significant reductions in manufacturing costs and cycle times while also getting more customized products. On a less optimistic note, these trends may also spell the end for lower tier manufacturers and suppliers who can’t afford (or don’t understand) the investments that will be required to realize the full potential of Industry 4.0.