The Next Step in Manufacturing

Today, the most precious resource in the manufacturing industry isn't steel, coal, or electricity—it’s data. Companies are beginning their journey of Industry 4.0 manufacturing, the latest industrial revolution driven by artificial intelligence and massive connectivity.

In this new age, data generated by sensors and digital systems enable businesses to monitor processes taking place in the physical world, laying the foundation for more flexible modes of production. It’s an approach that’s increasingly required due to changing consumer demands.

But consumer demand is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the current emphasis on Industry 4.0. With economic, geopolitical, environmental, and population issues and crises rippling across the globe, industrial labor supply and supply chains are being impacted like never before. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, has put a spotlight on this need for advanced technology, real-time data, and flexible manufacturing and supply chains.

With increased automation and robots taking on repetitive, dangerous work, manufacturers can augment human labor and ensure continuity of production. This frees up workers to leverage their cognitive brain power and enables re-shoring of previously off-shored automated and repetitive work.

“There are more and more capabilities people are discussing, like the use of IoT, robots, and augmented reality in manufacturing settings,” said Kaibo Liu, associate director of the IoT Systems Research Center and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “You’ll start to see higher and higher resolution data gathered from the manufacturing process, making more aspects of decision-making possible in real-time.”

More localized supply chains also can add new flexibility to manufacturing, with the added benefit of reduced environmental impact from lower transportation complexity. Finally, with reliable and real-time data and easily reconfigurable systems, manufacturers can make decisions quickly, such as schedule maintenance, adjust a machine setting, or pivot from making shirts to face masks.

While some elements of the next industrial revolution remain aspirational—like fleets of autonomous robots cooperating on advanced tasks such as construction, recovery, and rescue—others are already being realized. One example here is decentralized 3D-printing facilities, which are reducing time-to-market and time-to-customer for advanced manufacturing.

With the right partners, today’s businesses can access many of the gains in efficiency, safety, and productivity promised by Industry 4.0 manufacturing—and set the stage for the transformative next step in manufacturing.

The 4th Revolution

The third industrial revolution brought us electronics, computing, telecommunications, and digital technologies. This allowed manufacturers to design plants to mass-produce a small number of products, or even a single product, at high volume. Today, a greater level of flexibility is required as consumers expect more options and levels of customization than what was available in the 1920s—or the early 2000s, for that matter.

“If you want to buy a car, there are many options you can choose from,” says Kevin Carlin, vice president of condition-based monitoring Otosense AI at Analog Devices. “Manufacturers need to be able to cater to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of different configurations. Then they need to manage the entire plant and supply chain to be able to respond to that in real-time and configure their factories to move from one model to another.”

Making the leap is no simple matter. Most factories rely on an existing, sometimes dated, technology ecosystem. Merely replacing old equipment with new equipment is expensive and often unrealistic. It’s one reason why the road to Industry 4.0 manufacturing may be a matter of augmentation rather than replacement, bringing the intelligence enabled by modern-day IT down to the machines already on the factory floor.

By setting up a wireless, sensor-driven communication network at the production level, partners like Analog Devices could help manufacturers realize the promise of emerging technologies such as condition-based monitoring. Here, the health of a specific machine or part can be monitored by sensors, allowing plants to identify, diagnose, and solve abnormalities before they become an issue or possibly even fail outright.

Such real-time monitoring could extend equipment lifespans and increase throughput. Given that unscheduled downtime may amount to nearly a quarter of total manufacturing costs, predictive maintenance has the potential to unlock significant savings and productivity.

The Cost of Downtime

Unplanned downtime has a steep cost for manufacturers—and preventing it is a major goal of the technologies that will define industry 4.0 manufacturing.

Bringing IT to the Factory Floor

As Industry 4.0 approaches, manufacturers are making the jump from legacy computer infrastructure to new network solutions driving faster speeds, better data management, and increased energy efficiency.

At the heart of Industry 4.0 manufacturing is a concept known as interoperability, or the ability to communicate real-time data across numerous industrial IoT (IIoT) devices. Manufacturing floors use equipment, software protocols, and proprietary networks from a number of equipment manufacturers. To date, there hasn’t been a way for these individual protocols and networks to talk to each other. The emergence of time-sensitive networking (TSN) will enable this for the first time.