Industry 4.0 Opportunities and Challenges

FountainBlue’s July 19 VIP roundtable was on the topic of ‘Industry 4.0 Opportunities and Challenges’. Please join me in thanking our gracious hosts at ASML and our executives in attendance for their input and advice. Below are notes from the conversation. 

The drive for better, faster, more customized, and higher quality results is fueling advancements in manufacturing. The problems around the next innovations in manufacturing are complex, and the stakes are high.

• It’s a challenge to integrate a host of software and hardware solutions efficiently and cost-effectively.
• It’s difficult to provide customized solutions to individual customers and to do so dynamically in volume, within budgets.
• There are many regulations and policies within companies, across companies, within countries, within industries. What’s more, everything keeps changing, so it’s hard to stay on top of these requirements.
• It’s of paramount importance to protect the security of the solution, the privacy of the customers. 

There are severe financial, relationship and brand consequences if any of the above is compromised or sub-par. Yet each company must adopt new principles, new ways of doing things to remain relevant.

• Have a customer-centric mind set. Understand that the best solutions may not be the best science or even the best engineering solutions. It’s what the markets, the customers will adopt and embrace and ultimately pay for.
• Understand what the problems of the customer and how best to solve their problems at scale, and how to measure results. For example, consider correlating individual sensor readings to downstream measured results.
• Respect the need for security, the need for privacy for all stakeholders while also consistently delivering quality personalized solutions for customers.
• Create an ecosystem of stakeholders and collaborate with them to deliver solutions at scale.
• Take a system design approach and integrate the use of software, hardware, processes and tools in designing advanced manufacturing solutions.
  
• Consider adopting simulations (and augmented reality) and modeling when designing advanced manufacturing solutions.
• Be modular with your design so that you can correct and redirect as needed. 
• Optimize your supply chain so it’s just in time, leveraging AI to predict what ‘just-in-time’ means.
• Leverage ML and AI to understand and predict faults, to better anticipate and address problems in general.  

It’s clear from our thought-provoking, interactive conversation that Advanced Manufacturing is the future. And this future will be seized by leaders and companies who are proactive, strategic, collaborative, as represented by the executives in attendance at the roundtable.

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