Our Chairman, Ronaldo Ronaldo, recently attended Hannover Messe 2015. Here he gives us his personal feedback from the event:
Hannover Messe 2015 once again became the forum of discussion and showcase of the development of Industrie4.01 or also deeply associated with Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). Having attended the exhibition, I would like to outline the recent updates on this topic thus far with some personal opinions.
CPS and Industrie 4.0 are often used interchangeably in the media and have undoubtedly create some confusion. I'm taking a view that Industrie 4.0, being hoped to be the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is an impact by adoption of technologies such as CPS or Internet of Things (IoT)2. Therefore, for a clarity, this article will concentrate on using the term CPS.
During the exhibition in 2015, a number of theme that are universally publicised are;
- The use of RFID as means of interoperability between machines and product
- Lot 1 production, which is a capability to produce a product with a unit cost without the need of mass production
- Extremely flexible production that can be achieved through distributed control system and to certain extend through modular production system
The scenarios and case studies were pictured with highly optimised processes, all are planned properly and executed precisely within its own factory. Some have also showed how downtime can be minimised to near zero with the total interconnectivity, but still within its own factory.
Evolution vs Revolution
With the view of the current results showcased at this year, can we call CPS as a revolution? The concept of creating value that starts from customer needs, making it flow through reducing batch sizes, pulling work and seeking perfection have been the fundamental of Lean Thinking since the 1950s. It could be argued that CPS could be an exemplification of Lean Thinking in pursuit of perfection. It could also be argued that it’s an extension of, or part of, the Digital Revolution.
Having said that, there is an element whereby CPS can live up its name to be synonymous to Industrie 4.0 (Fourth Industrial Revolution) when CPS is applied beyond a specific value stream. It’s no longer focus on only one factory boundary, but throughout the whole Supply Chain, further into multiple value streams, and perhaps throughout the Circular Economy. One can imagine therefore, the impact can be enormous, and as such may become a true revolution. 3 The CPS & properly networked supply chain would thrive well in this situation, yet as of 2015, such exploitation has yet been exemplified.
1 The background and progress of Industrie4.0 can be followed on GTAI (Germany Trade and Invest) homepage http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Navigation/EN/Invest/Industries/Smarter-business/smart-products-industrie-4.0.html
2 In the USA, the exploitation of IoT can be followed on Industrial Internet Consortium homepage http://www.iiconsortium.org
3 GE predicts USD 32.3trillion as the current opportunity, whilst McKinsey estimated an impact of USD 2.7trillion - 6.2 trillion annually by 2025. Ref: “Industrial Internet: Pushing the Boundaries of Minds and Machines”, Peter C. Evans and Marco Annunziata, GE, November 26, 2012, and “Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy”, McKinsey Global Institute, 2013.
Barriers and challenges
We are only in the fourth year since the term “Industrie 4.0” was coined, are we expecting too much in a short time? Quite possibly, however the period of industrial revolutions is becoming shorter and shorter due to convergence of key enabling technologies. In case of Industrie 4.0, these key enabling technologies, eg. big data storage, cloud distribution, computational power, sensors, instrumentations, protocol and standards, whilst it may currently not perfectly aligned with Industrie 4.0 vision, they are already existed. Yet even in 2015 such test beds have not been realised.
The barriers in realisation are not the technologies, but rather, in my opinion, rooted in our human nature; on how we execute competitive vs collaborative strategies and how we manage security and risk.
Consider that, the idealised vision of Industrie 4.0 might have been contributing as its own stumbling blocks;
- End-to-end transparency may have an impact on;
Security & Protection - can the whole supply chain being trusted with all information stored or embedded within the product
Managing capacities & breakdown – are companies ready to share their capacities information in full transparency?
- How one can justify a value creation (or profit) within each processes when they are becoming seamlessly integrated, will they be adequately rewarded in the utilisation of their proprietary technologies or methodologies?
- Focusing on Human to machine interaction & Machine to Machine interaction could be possible at operational level, how about decision making? How about Human to Human interaction? Will an A.I. fully drive such system?4
- End-to-end engineering – how an entrepreneur can realise all aspects of the product upfront – would that lead to even a slower New Product Introduction? Would we see Technology or Supply Chain Clusters becomes superseded with truly Global operation in the near future?
Final remarks
As a manufacturing engineer, the development in this area is very fascinating and could not have come at a better time. After all, with the advent of social media, sharing economy and crowdsourcing becoming more and more popular. Is the Fourth Industrial Revolution ought to adopt a sharing economy model? Can the same concept applicable in engineering world? Engineering companies traditionally often require sound financial foundation. How are things stand legally when things go wrong?5 I suppose it not a clear cut answer, but perhaps we need to have legal and financial systems that can accommodate and encourage such collaborative model. As usual, disruptive technologies will not be called a revolution if it doesn’t change the world around it & with that let’s applaud those who work in this area to engineer a better world.
4 5 Very Smart People Who Think Artificial Intelligence Could Bring the Apocalypse 2nd Dec 2014. http://time.com/3614349/artificial-intelligence-singularity-stephen-hawking-elon-musk/
5 Companies like Uber are currently facing legal difficulties in some countries (http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdiamandis/2014/09/08/uber-vs-the-law-my-moneys-on-uber/)