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Industry 4.0 Update The concept of Industry 4.0 is intriguing, yet its progress in the wire and cable industry has not followed that of a rising star. Is it a matter of time, confidence that it makes sense or how/where it is deployed? Presented here are observations from WAI Webinar panelists, an MIT professor, a naysayer, and more. Also, see two related Product Focus entries (pp. 64-70).
Has the Smart Factory lost its momentum ... or found a new fit? U.K.-based Cimteq Ltd. supplies CableBuilder, CableMES and CableBuilder 3D software for wire and cable industry production. Below, Ali Shehab, co-director explains why he believes that the technology that goes into Industry 4.0 makes sense, the transition will take time, yet there are elements where it can make a difference now. Lockdown has brought into question every element of how the cable factory does business: where it sources its raw materials; how it can maintain productivity with a skeleton workforce; and how it can quickly diversify its markets when some of its customers have hit a standstill. Ali Shehab In an environment now demanding even greater agility, what role can Industry 4.0 play? Undoubtedly, there are benefits: big data can capture intelligence, allowing more timely business decisions; fully immersive virtual and augmented reality, enabling cable products to be assessed to see how they will interact with other products; and robotics, allowing the re-pointing of human resource to more skilled work such as engineering or programming. Cable manufacturers adopting Industry 4.0 are, however, unlikely to see a return on their investment for a number of years. So what alternative is there in the short term for the cable factory seeking to drive its competitive advantage? Let’s start with the perennial problem of human error. A single mistake by a design engineer entering the wrong product code can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The question for cable manufacturers is how far they are
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prepared to accept these mistakes. Building the cost of these mistakes in as tolerance—on the basis that a tailored cable MES program will alert the machine operator to the error in a timely fashion—may be more cost effective than investing in expensive automation processes that eradicate the errors entirely. It’s true that there’s little point in introducing high-end machines without considering how processes and protocols need to be improved across the factory. The Industry 4.0 focus should be on where it can most benefit a factory. For example, one human operator can easily service five different machines in the current cable manufacturing environment while the ratio for a robotic arm is 1:1. There is no one size fits all as far as Industry 4.0 is concerned, and how big data, augmented and virtual reality, and robotics are introduced. Ensuring that a factory’s processes, reporting, communication channels and decision making are logical and proved to be working is the critical first step for any cable manufacturer, large or small, in their Industry 4.0 journey. Only then can they ever be certain that the direction of travel is the right one. Cimteq offers a White Paper (see p. 71) on this subject, “Applying Industry 4.0 to the Cable Factory Environment,” that can be found at its website or by contacting Marketing Manager Katy Harrison at katy.harrison@cimteq.com.
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WAI webinar panel: the goal is useful data, shop floor results WAI’s June 10 webinar, Digital Transformation in a Quarantined World, featured Southwire Senior Vice President Will Berry III, Oden Technologies CEO Willem Sundblad and RoviSys Director of Industrial Artificial Intelligence Bryan DeBois, moderated by Prysmian Group Vice President of Engineering Richard Baker. Below are edited excerpts from the session. Baker: Our audience wants to learn how remote monitoring can be used for best results in wire and cable manufacturing. Starting with Will, please share a general overview of how you’re involved in Industry 4.0. Berry: I’m responsible for Southwire’s modernization, and those efforts include equipment and process improvements, automation and a connected enterprise. We’re in the second year of a five-year plan. We are improving the flow and velocity of product through our manuWilliam Berry facturing facilities to minimize SVP Modernization inventory while decreasing Southwire Company delivery times, scrap and material usage along the way. We’re also trying to error-proof our systems. Sundblad: Our job is to help manufacturers find the best actions to take and to employ them as fast as possible. That includes integrating data from the different silos on the factory floor, and providing the appropriate visualization so you can understand how you’re doing and why. By leveraging machine learning applied analytics, we show you what’s possible in terms of opportunity cost, and also what your optimal settings are. DeBois: Being a global system integrator, RoviSys is involved on the front end of these engagements. We help customers frame and attach a project, and connect it to an ROI. We then design the system and bring in the relevant vendors. We have the whole engineering staff implement a digital transformation project from beginning to end, and we support the solution long term. We work with vendors like Oden and others, designing out the entire solution and supporting the customer from beginning to end. Baker: Willem, we’ve heard a lot lately about industrial IoT technologies. Can you give us your perspective on the rise of smart factories? Sundblad: Ultimately, it’s about helping people make better decisions and faster actions, because the value is only created when you take an action that is better and different than what you did before. The merging of the domain knowlW W W. W I R E N E T. O R G
Oden Technologies chart showing the different steps that are needed for a Smart Factory to be effective. edge of the people and the computational power of a digital system creates that opportunity. It helps reduce the workforce on the factory floor, so ultimately, it’s a cost savings. Step one is connecting the assets so you can find the data and find answers faster. Step two is for predictive analytics, where for both quality and maintenance issues, you can learn from the historical data to prevent issues from happening. We focus a lot on prescriptive analytics, where you both prescribe what is the potential ROI or outcome, and what are the right settings to get there. We send those recommendations to process engineers who validate it, and then you either make a change to the master process or you tell the operators to make the products in a different way. The final step, the AI-driven automation, is where you tie the loop from that recommendation engine back into the automation system for a faster time to action. I don’t think that we’ll see AI control machines anytime soon because we want to keep operators and people in the loop to validate and continue to reinforce the learning of that algorithms. However, there will be fewer people for volume manufacturing as their time and effort can be better spent in other areas, driving new products, more customization, shorter lead times, et cetera. Baker: Will, I’m sure that you’ve got machines on different levels through this pyramid that Willem described. What needs to be considered when implementing industrial IoT technology?
Willem Sundblad CEO Oden Technologies
Berry: For us to get started, the key is executive leadership support, because the cost to begin an industrial IoT solution in operations can be quite high, with little value at
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