What’s in it for you? That is, how can the increasingly hallowed movement called Industry 4.0 help you? If you’ve been following the development and adoption of Industry 4.0, you already know that the goals are to improve productivity, flexibility, and safety in your factory. Further goals are expected to bring things like edge-to-cloud computing, more powerful analytics, and methods to adapt systems for mass customization. It’s pretty heady stuff. Within all of those offerings, though, are some real practical solutions.
One inevitable occurrence in factories and plants everywhere is machine failure. When a machine vital to the process goes down, productivity goes down or completely stops. It can lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars daily. This situation is so critical that considerable work has gone into finding ways to predict the occurrence of such an event.