Moderate Blue and Orange Electronics Product Image Sets
The COVID-19 pandemic, apart from inducing serious health challenges across the globe, also brought forth disruptions in the supply-chain ecosystem especially in the manufacturing sector. Increased volatility in the manufacturing market cascaded leaders to ponder over the question, how will manufacturing and its supply chains look after COVID-19?
The immediate response to the COVID-19 crisis has been the adoption of digital solutions. Manufacturing leaders are leveraging Industry 4.0 solutions to handle the market volatility, communication disruptions and supply chain issues. Most of the companies have adopted a centralised nerve centre, around 39 percent of them have adopted a control-tower approach in the bid to improve and increase end-to-end supply chain transparency.
Industry 4.0 can be interchangeably used with the fourth industrial revolution, the term represents a new automation stage in the way organisations can control their industrial value chain. This involves increased adoption of cyber-physical systems or smart machines, that leverage modern technologies and control systems, have softwares systems that capitalise the increased capabilities of IoT (Internet of Things). This intricate web of networks, paves way for easy communication – products and means of production can communicate better and enjoy transparency, which further results in value creation and real-time optimization.
Manufacturing leaders are leveraging cyber-physical systems to create smart factories. These smart factories capitalise the Internet of Things for remote monitoring, for tracking and tracing.
Ben and Gaws legal explains that Industry 4.0 can be defined as the trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies that consists of cyber-physical systems, cloud computing, the Internet of things and cognitive computing, and the amalgamation of all these to create smart factories.
Industry 4.0 is often interchangeably used as the fourth industrial revolution and has the following characteristics –
It brings more automation in comparison to the third industrial revolution.
It bridges the gap between the physical and digital world via cyber-physical systems.
These cyber-systems are enabled and super charged by the Industrial Internet of Things
Increased shift from central industrial control systems to smart solutions, products and interfaces.
Closed -loop models and control systems
Customisation of products and services.
Industrial 4.0’s goal is to provide and enable a decision-making process which is autonomous, real-time monitoring of assets and processes, enabling efficient and effective real-time connectivity generating value creation through transparent involvement of stakeholders and horizontal and vertical integration.
Ben & Gaws legal, recently launched fabricationbazar.com, a website that offers real-time monitoring, tracking and tracing of the products. The website has led to an increased real-time optimization, transparency and trust among the stakeholders. The portal offers a great deal of information related to products, document approval stages, displays production images from on-site and gives information of the status of installation as well.
This direct model of personalised servicing and production, and customer interaction (including real-time actual images of the products) has cut down inefficiencies, and have reduced the cost of intermediaries. This new digital supply chain model has sped up production, improved efficiencies, increased trust and transparency and has added value to the Ben & Gaws brand name.
Industry 4.0 is nothing but information-intensive metamorphosis of the manufacturing and related industries in today’s world of people, processes, services, systems, big data and IoT enabled assets. All this enables utilisation of data and information and transforming it into actionables for the customers or clients thereby improving the customer experience and efficiency of the industrial operations.
The key player is most definitely the Internet of Things equipped with its arsenal of IoT stack components, IoT platforms and Industrial IoT gateways, devices and much more. However, it is just not limited to Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing along with cloud platforms, advanced data analytics, advanced storage solutions, mobile, data communications, network technologies, manufacturing execution systems, enterprise solutions, enterprise resource planning technologies, and innovative data exchange models, all of these have a important role to play in enabling Industrial 4.0 for the manufacturing sector.
The Coronavirus pandemic may have thrown the world off rail from its path of economic development, but it has also presented an opportunity for all of us to do better and build better. As the economies and organisations across the world restart their normal operations, they have the opportunity to rebuild better. We have the opportunity to reimagine our future with digitised capabilities and build more resilient operations – one which doesn’t get disrupted due to any future epidemic or pandemic. Industry 4.0’s success has shown it is indeed the transformative journey that every industrial sector must embark on, for it can be scaled for increased efficiency, productivity, value and transparency.