Manufacturing Analytics at the Core of Industry 4.0
As we embark on the fourth industrial revolution, manufacturers across the globe – and across all industry sectors – are captivated by the promise of various cyber-physical systems that enable the computerization of manufacturing. In particular, decentralized intelligence, which helps to create intelligent object networking and independent process management with the interaction of the real and virtual worlds, represents an exciting new aspect of the manufacturing and production process.
The basic principle is that by connecting machines and systems, we can create intelligent networks along the value chain that control each other. For example, machines would be able to predict failures and trigger maintenance processes autonomously, or self-organize logistics that react to changes in production. Industry 4.0 technologies include many of today’s buzz-words, like Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality, the cloud, internet of things (IoT) and M2M (machine-to-machine communication).
Peter Guilfoyle, Northwest Analytics
These technologies offer the vision of a future with efficient, self-automated manufacturing processes that monitor themselves, so they never go wrong. However, while many manufacturers are eager to embrace these new technologies, it isn’t uncommon for their progress to falter as they meet a number of stumbling blocks along the way. Typically, these companies stumble because they failed to establish the basic foundation on which to build their digital platforms. That foundation lies in manufacturing analytics – the core of everything that is Industry 4.0.
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