MAGAZINE FOR EXECUTIVES & DECISION MAKERS
EDITORIAL
How intelligent machines in the Industry 4.0 era will transform everything we know — by Dirk Vermant
THE NEW WORLD OF CONNECTED MACHINERY
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achines have always been great and done amazing things for us. But today we are in the middle of a giant revolution. Machines are becoming intelligent. Machinery automation is like our human body.We see with our eyes.That’s sensing.We move with our hands and arms. That’s actuation and we process with our brains. That’s process control. Machines have classically been only like the actuation. Over the past 30 years, we added a lot of sensors and sense into machines. But still, machines are missing one key element and that is intelligence. The fourth industrial revolution will bring that into life. Why do we call it “fourth”? The first one was the steam machine.The second one were linear assembly systems. Think how Henry Ford’s did it with his Model T. Actually they were first implemented in the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Third were the robots that entered our factories and fourth is now the combination of physical products, intelligence and big data. All those elements like autonomous robots, additive manufacturing technologies and big data analytics, they already exist today. So it’s starting to happen.They are not full blown yet and not yet connected to each other. Once they are, it will allow for new ways to produce, to design, for companies to operate and it will also change the way how we work and the world of labour. You might say, “Well, how does this all help us?”
APR-MAY 2019
Uitgever/ éditeur & directeur Dirk Vermant
Think about a helicopter stuck somewhere at a remote place in Africa. It’s needed in a food delivery mission. The next mechanic engineer is some 17 flight hours away. But we want the chopper back in the air within two hours. This is possible with Industry 4.0. We will figure out in seven minutes. Let’s first look at the production and the products we all like – food and beverage.That’s a $600 billion industry constantly innovating in order to catch our attention. Let’s take the example of yogurt, 500 millilitre a glass. In the past it came in four flavours. Today the very same product from the very same company comes in 96 variants. If you look at the machinery that’s behind that, it’s a fascinating piece of equipment able to produce some 24,000 of those yogurts per hour. But in essence, the machine is dumb. It will do exactly how it was set up. So if we want to fill hazelnut yogurt and we have a chocolate packaging and chocolate label around that, the machine will do exactly that and you will have hazelnut yogurt that looks from the outside like chocolate, all 24,000 of them per hour. In the best case, this error is detected before the product leaves the factory. It will create a quality
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