You can almost hear the clanking of steins as our German peers pick this up in Das Manufacturer magazine. Six in 10 UK manufacturing managers have never even heard of Industry 4.0 according to an exclusive poll by Works Management and software firm, Infor. British industry appears switched off in the face of global manufacturing’s JFK moment where artificially intelligent machinery is set to step up and autonomously manage production processes.
The age of the smart factory, aka the Internet of Things or Industry 4.0, seems destined to be decked in red, gold and black. It’s an epoch promising advances in production efficiency, quality, flexibility and cost so profound that Made in Germany could soon become de facto on every t-shirt, trainer and electronic toy (http://tinyurl.com/k24q6xw).
“Germany is forging ahead. They think the Internet of Things will add 3% on their GDP,” Phil Lewis, vice president, solution consulting EMEA at Infor, told a Works Management summit convened in London last month to address UK manufacturing’s apparent indifference to the technological revolution.
“They’re investing heavily with organisations such as Siemens and Bosch working with the government on making it happen. When I looked at the survey findings here (see image right), I was worried. Sixty per cent of organisation have never heard of Industry 4.0 – that’s huge... The problem with this is if we sit back and watch Germany thrive, we will start to lose, they will gobble us up.”
Those muttering “new fangled nonsense” under their breath take note. Industry 4.0 heralds seismic gains in operational efficiency that could boost manufacturing’s share of GDP in Europe from 15% to 20% by 2020. The revolution has started with a proliferation of sensors connected to cloud-based internet and could end in machines calling the shots on shopfloor processes.
It might sound like something out of a sci-fi thriller, but machines really will talk to one another. Plant could autonomously decide to close down a line over quality concerns or initiate maintenance activity. Free-thinking factory kit could also follow up ideas with action. German researchers are investigating cyber physical systems where equipment can determine optimum production flow and then physically move into position to deliver it.
“Sensors monitoring information and making use of data to alter performance, that’s the Internet of Things in action,” Lewis explained. A back to basics explanation that triggered a light bulb moment among assembled site managers who were hitherto bamboozled by the term. “The Internet of Things, I’ll be honest, I’d never heard the terminology until about nine months ago,” revealed Rob Love site leader at sensor manufacturer, City Technology.
“As a business looking at our products IoT is the topic of the moment – how do we apply our sensors and utilise the value in the data?” he mused. “I didn’t think we applied it in the factory, but actually, listening to today’s conversation, yes we do. We use RF tagging, scan every product through every process and use the data to poka-yoke the products. We already do this, but the terminology threw me.”
Love wasn’t alone in experiencing an epiphany. “Our old traditional business was where we used to supply analogue inks to a customer who put the ink on a press,” reflected Colin Boughton, European ops director at Fujifilm, Broadstairs. “Now we supply a complete system, a digital printer with an ink cartridge and RFID tag. Customers plug that into their machine and it tells us and them the ink usage as well as preventing connection of the pouch to the incorrect ink channel, and the use of third party ink with that machine. Customers are now asking us to use that data to alert them to many things, and even to automatically supply them with ink when they are running low. But is that the Internet of Things?”
A resounding ‘yes’ came back from Infor’s technology experts. “That’s a great example of the IOT in action,” said Simon Hooker, director of solution consulting at Infor. “I think that’s the problem with the IT industry is we like to come up with a name for something that already exists to make it sound new and exciting. But the difference now is because of a perfect storm of things coming together: cloud computing, big data analytics, mobile communications, the opportunities that presents to organisations are much more varied and dynamic than they were five years ago.”
And it turns out a factory in Broadstairs is just as Industry 4.0 savvy as one situated in Berlin. “We can now know how many hours the customer’s printer has run and can tell them when is experiencing print performance issues and when it’s due for a service,” enthused Boughton. “That’s what we’re talking about, I just didn’t realise it was called Industry 4.0 or the Internet of Things.”
Another site flying the flag for the UK’s smart factory movement is Arla Foods, Aylesbury. Here automated guided vehicles (AGVs) transport milk from the production line onto lorries for despatch. The AGVs communicate with one another and lineside equipment to ensure they’re in the right place at the right time. “We’ve won an enormous amount of volume because we can prove everything we’ve made is 100% correct”, said Alan Causon, engineering manager at Arla Foods. “That’s because of the level of automation we’ve adopted at our site.”
Sites like Arla, Fujifilm and City Technology challenge the misnomer of British manufacturers as technological laggards. But these sites also highlight our shortcomings. All store crux data on site-based servers with use of cloud-based services given short shrift. “Data security is a massive concern,” said Causon. “We have lots of information floating around Arla. If that information was to be hacked by a competitor and they gained insight into our specialised processes, that could be catastrophic.”
Security fears that were echoed by Boughton of Fujifilm. “IP is absolutely key for us. Anyone can make an ink 80% right, but it’s the other 20% that’s key... our ink formulations are stored on the server and backed up. If we lose those formulations we’re dead.”
But, cling to their servers too long and UK companies could end up with something more akin to Industry 3.5 than 4.0. The ability to share manufacturing data with suppliers and customers freely via cloud-based internet is critical to realising the true potential of Industry 4.0 according to IT experts. “It’s not just using that information within your company to be more efficient,” said Lewis of Infor. “It’s about thinking this information has a value and being able to turn that into a new revenue stream.”
Lewis turned to stairlift manufacturer Stannah represented by Martin Alexander, business improvement engineer, at the meeting as an example. “When you go the gym you have sensors in the all equipment telling you your heart rate, blood pressure and temperature. If you could build that into Stannah’s stairlifts and capture data about the user then that’s going to have enormous value to the medical profession.”
Teething troubles around standardisation will have to be overcome first warned manufacturing delegates. “We launched a website portal where we provide order information for our suppliers,” said Peter Bennet, MD at Groveley Precision Engineering. “We’ve given them log-in details and made it as easy as possible for them to access. But the problem is we get schedules from companies in their format and we have to convert them into ours.” It was a statement that triggered plenty of head nodding around the table.
The snag is one that could surely be overcome through a more collaborative industry-wide approach to embracing Industry 4.0 in the UK; the kind of collectivism that thrives across the Channel. Germany’s manufacturing sector has committed €40 billion a year to advancing the smart factory by 2020.
Confidence has been buoyed by partisan government backing with £280m pledged to enabling new technologies. Chancellor Merkel makes regular public overtures about the potential of Industry 4.0 to power Germany to global manufacturing hegemony.
UK manufacturing stands in stark contrast to the teutonic trailblazers. Our factories stroll into Industry 4.0 with the eccentric path of an amateur ramblers association out for their Boxing Day walk.
UK sites are clearly pioneering some impressive Industry 4.0 activity as evidenced at this summit. However, we appear far more ambiguous over what the eventual mix between smart plant, smart people and processes will be in any future manufacturing utopia. An overwhelming 47% of UK managers in WM’s survey felt more effective people management held the biggest sway for productivity gains – double the number that voted for new Industry 4.0 enabled plant to achieve the same ends. A further 64% said they were monitoring Industry 4.0, but would only move on it when the business case become irresistible.
It’s a view best summed up on the day by Bennet of Groveley: “Most people I know perform best practice and use best possible tools. Industry 4.0 just happens to be another tool and we’ll use it as such.”
So a fascinating ideological battle is set to unfold. German single mindedness and precision verses no-nonsense British pragmatism. And if the latter wins through, despite all the furore over futuristic German factories and antiquated British industry, then you might forgive one or two Brits for feeling rather smug. Now somewhere those ever-organised Germans have a word for that.
Had you ever heard of Industry 4.0 before reading this article? Email your views on the brave new world to Max Gosney at mgosney@findlay.co.uk
How Germany has seized pole position on Industry 4.0
If you were among the 60% of manufacturing managers in our survey who’d never heard of Industry 4.0 then the bad news is your German peers have had a nine-year head start. Germany launched a national high tech strategy in 2006 which set out a mission to become a global powerhouse in new technologies. The Industry 4.0 element has been allocated €200m in state funding and focuses on research areas including human-to-machine interaction and cyber physical production systems (www.smart-electroni-factory.de). No surprise then that Germany is ranked as frontrunner in a ranking of European nations’ Industry 4.0 credentials by global strategy consultant Roland Berger. Scoring is based on degree of automation, innovation and workforce readiness with four classifications: traditionalists like the Czech Republic with strong industrial bases, but low uptake of tech, hesitators like Italy with unreliable economies and industry, and potentialists like the UK. We’ve shown innovation and improvement despite recent decay in our industrial bases and are the dark horses to triumph in the fourth industrial revolution.
Five ways Industry 4.0 could change your factory
1 Manufacturing flow/efficiency
No longer will you need to rely on flesh and blood operators spotting a bottleneck before it’s too late. Smart machines could be your guardians of quality and efficiency in the factory of the future. Experts predict a proliferation in lineside sensors that ‘talk’ to one another as well as sister technology in warehouses, back offices and the wider supply chain. The clever kit will be able to assess production runs against pre-determined KPIs and tweak processes.
Let’s step inside the DeLorean and visit an Industry 4.0-enabled condiments factory to illustrate the point. Here, the viscosity of a batch of ketchup bottles has suddenly dipped below accepted tolerance levels. Never fear, our artificially intelligent plant is here. Lineside filler sensors beam the bad news up the line to a capping machine, which spots the rogue sauce bottles and reroutes them safely into a siding for reuse. The plant then engages in the computerised equivalent of a kaizen blitz. Ingredient mixing machines are told to boost the thickener levels; packaging kit is pre-warned about a deviation in expected order patterns with suppliers and the customer is told about the change via the cloud.
2 Machine-led maintenance
Artificially intelligent plant isn’t going to hang around and wait for Bob in engineering to remember to top up the oil on the vacuum pumps. Bosch, GE and Johnson Controls predict the Internet of Things will herald autonomous maintenance regimes. And the tasks could well be performed by the plant itself. The German Artificial Intelligence Research Centre in Kaiserslautern is studying cyber physical systems: a kind of estuary between electronics and mechanical systems. Cyber physical systems look at translating sensor data into mechanical movements. The concept is that as robotics advances, plant will not only grasp that a task needs to be performed, but also be able to move itself into the correct position on the line and perform it.
3 Smoother supply chain and low-cost customisation
Industry 4.0 opens up a far more collaborative approach to supply chains according to Infor. Lewis said: “We see the supply chain becoming a network of organisations coming together to achieve what one organisation used to do 20 years ago. The internet and the cloud allows everything about your commercial process to be held within one system.” Suppliers could see live production data and be instantly alerted to any deviations. Manufacturers could also post jobs onto the cloud for the supply chain to tender. An upshot of all the real time communication combined with smarter shopfloor automation will be heightened flexibility in the factory and greater customisation of goods.
4 Servitisation
The real winners from Industry 4.0 will be the firms who can derive new profit stream from all that data they’re capturing about their products, say experts. Trailblazers include manufacturers like Rolls-Royce who’ve progressed from building jet engines to building lifetime service support around them. We will see far more sophisticated marketing linked to data, said Lewis. He offered the example of sensor-laden car beaming details about who’s in the car and how long they’ve been travelling to the nearest service station. Software could then calculate our partiality to a bacon roll or family meal deal and beam it back to the car’s computer, said Lewis.
5 The demise of human workers?
All these advantages point towards people becoming an expensive luxury in the future factory. But you’d be wrong to hang up your hi-vis just yet according to some future gazing white papers. Technology will empower rather than replace us according to a white paper by Lopez Research. This describes devices providing instant lineside data to plant mangers on tablets or possibly via augmented reality (Minority Report-style computer-generated graphics).
Plant bosses and engineers will be freed from the shackles of the back office PC and free to indulge in the gemba walk instead. How many operators they might find to converse with on their stroll is debatable. Low skilled tasks will face intense competition from intelligent automation. However, research firm Affinitive Native says we will need an influx of digital natives: people who are au fait with technology and can manage the interface between human and machine. Those organised Germans have already begun shaping their education system to ensure future workers are geared up with the technical and the industrial aspects of working in an Industry 4.0 factory.
The four great industrial revolutions
1 Edmund Cartwright invents the steam-powered loom and a proliferation of textile mills in Lancashire sparks the world’s first industrial revolution.
2 Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the factory along comes Henry Ford with mass production. Industry 2.0 arrives.
3 The invention of electronics and computers and their integration into production lines sparks the third revolution in the 1960s.
4 The coming together of automation, cloud based internet and machine-to-machine communication heralds Industry 4.0. The biggest thing ever, well until Industry 5.0...
