Industry 4.0

What is Industry 4.0 and What Value can it deliver:

Industry 4.0 is the fourth industrial revolution. It represents the coming age of cyber physical systems and is manifested in many forms of technology such as: 3D Printing, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) & Industrial IoT (IIoT).

Industry 4.0 technology has become part of our everyday lives for all of us as consumers as we have become accustomed to such luxuries as cloud data processing with a single tap of an app on each of our smart phones.

Invariably common core denominators exists across these technologies such as increased device connectivity, decreasing hardware costs, foundations of data interoperability such as OPC UA.

Physical products are able to communicate through connectivity. Smart, connected products in the Internet of Things (IoT) blur the line between products and services. They enable an entirely new set of capabilities that create value for both manufacturers and their customers.

 

For manufacturers (i.e., those in the Things business), these innovations not only have the potential to generate incredible amounts of new value, but also to disrupt the status quo.

 

The capabilities created and data generated by this new generation of smart, connected products requires new thinking about the enterprise applications and the connected ecosystem to optimise current business processes, drive better decision-making, and expand areas of innovation.

 

The adoption of such 4.0 technologies by traditional companies has been referred to as embarking on a digital transformation. This term has been used to describe the inherent change that takes places as a resulting from new tech adoption. The extent of this transformation can vary from case to case, even resulting in complete reengineering of business models or some offerings been made completely redundant. The level of disruption caused an be significant and with that will come opportunities and unforeseen threats.