A more open and communicative industry is having an impact on the adoption of technology in manufacturing, says Werma UK managing director Simon Adams, who sees the rise of Industry 4.0 gaining pace at a faster rate than ever before.
“Manufacturers are becoming more and more interested in it now, simply because a lot of their providers, such as Werma, are openly engaging with the market about what Industry 4.0 is and the benefits it can have,” he explains. “We can now add ‘Industry 4.0 compliance’ to the list of benefits a product has, and it actually means something to a lot of people now.”
A lot of the resistance that Industry 4.0 has faced in the past, continues Adams, stems from a very woolly definition of what it actually is. “I’ve had so many different definitions pushed my way,” he says. “It was originally, however, defined to me as a German-led focus group that looked at harnessing automation and digital technologies in the manufacturing process. I found that all a bit of a mouthful! The best way of looking at it, though, is simply as a way of process optimisation, just like lean or kaizen.”
Keeping up with the Joneses
Adams sees Industry 4.0 as a natural progression from some of the other trends that have hit manufacturing in recent years.
“I often think back five or six years, to when companies like Werma were beginning to promote their systems as a way of assisting lean manufacturing, which was the key topic of the time,” he says. “Again, just like with Industry 4.0, we had to explain a lot about what lean was all about, only for companies to often realise that they had been doing something similar for a long time, without giving it a specific label.”
Similar to lean, Adams envisions Industry 4.0 becoming part and parcel of everyday manufacturing operations – if it isn’t already.
“A lot of people are probably ‘doing’ Industry 4.0 to some degree already,” he says. “It’s critical, though, that companies – especially smaller ones – don’t just see Industry 4.0 as a way of keeping up with the Joneses. It’s an evolutionary optimisation of your processes and systems to make your business more sustainable, durable and profitable.”
Growing appeal for SMEs
These smaller companies are the ones that, on the whole, have been slowest to adopt Industry 4.0. There’s a good reason for that, says Adams. “SMEs can’t afford to, and don’t necessarily want to, turn their processes upside down just because someone has, as they see it, wheeled the latest bandwagon past their factory gates for them to jump on.
“Humans are, by their very nature, resistant to change,” he continues. “The responsibility of any manager is to ensure that any changes are sensitively and clearly outlined, and the process methodically worked through. The key thing one has to do is, having identified the benefits
of the new system, reverse that and look at the current process and its negative or difficult aspects. The staff will pick up on this – they’ll
be very keen to hear how you can make their job less repetitive or laborious.”
Adams uses data input as an example. “No longer will people have to note down numbers onto a spreadsheet, pass that onto someone else to put into a bigger spreadsheet, who’ll then wave it in front of the MD at the end of the month. An automated, ‘Industry 4.0’ approach to this will make the whole process easier and less mundane, and will mean people can be deployed to do things that will bring more value to the company.”
Simplifying the process
Werma are designers and manufacturers of industrial signalling technology: Andon lights, alarms and so on. They are harnessing Industry 4.0 in their new technology – something that Adams says brings added value that the customer may not even have known they could get. “We can now offer products that utilise the information that our signal devices can offer and, by adding smart electronics and data analysis, our devices bring real, tangible benefits to a manufacturing operation,” he explains.
The company’s newest technology, the Stock Saver Kanban Replenishment System, replaces the traditional, laborious need to manually fill out Kanban cards.
“These would then need to be collected by an operator, manually transferred into replenishment orders by production control, then relayed to the replenishment team who would then be able to go back and refill the line,” says Adams. “This is far too complicated. We have now automated the whole operation through the use of sensors, wireless information and automatic order replenishment systems.”
A changing job role?
This concept of a fully automated line replenishment system – and, indeed, Industry 4.0 in general – will mean that job roles across the factory of the future will be changing. Again, says Adams, industry can take a look to the early days of lean for examples. “If we go back to when kaizen and other CI techniques were first becoming mainstream ideas, manufacturers would take a bit of a ‘scattergun’ approach to them,” he explains. “They would get everyone in the factory to try and play a part, it wasn’t very focused and would distract people from their day jobs. Today, though, after the lean revolution, lots of companies went out and hired lean managers. People were given a specific role to improve the operation, under the auspices of ‘lean’. I will imagine that something similar will happen with Industry 4.0 as well – companies will hire Industry 4.0 specialists to transition the business.”
The challenge for industry, says Adams, will come from finding people to fill this hypothetical new role. “Digitalisation will prove to be more of a headache for the older generation than the young one. Future workers, who are now coming through school and college, will know of no other way of communicating and processing information than digitally.
“The real challenge will come in encouraging that tech-savvy generation into a career in manufacturing, rather than down a more ‘obvious’ digital route. That will always be the case, and is something that the industry is acutely aware of.”
The future, then, is a complex one. Changing technologies are one thing, but changing job roles, and finding the right people to fill positions that, in many cases, don’t even exist yet, are quite another. If Industry 4.0 is going to be the all-encompassing revolution it promises to be, manufacturers will have to find the answers to the problems sooner rather than later.
