1. Industry 4.0 is just hype.

This is about real technology that is proliferating our environments and industries. Advanced Data Analytics, Automation, Machine to Machine Communications and System Integration, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT)are widely available technologies. Individually these technologies have the potential to affect the entire value chain of your organization.

Combined together in combination with strategic plans and initiative building can impact your business exponentially and bring enormous value.

2. Industry 4.0 is only for large companies with large budgets to invest.

Small organizations can adopt any technology solutions as desired and hopefully driven by strategic, tactical and ROI value-add planning and vision as investment and organizational improvement indicates. Industry 4.0 is all about better decision making based in evidence and analysis. It is about optimizing business through tailored solutions and decision making that moves from the descriptive analytics to the predictive so that solutions can be prescribed that deliver and optimize value. Right sized and right fit for purpose for your business.

3. Automation, Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence will eliminate jobs.

The one thing about any technology solution is its overriding and ever present need to be for and supervised by people. Industry 4.0 is about delivering value from better decision making that optimizes how a business runs but also in leveraging its most valuable of assets, it’s people.

There is no doubt that like any Industrial Revolution preceding Industry 4.0 the nature of work will change. The point is to use technology to increase worker effectiveness. Instead of being put in the position of planning for breakdowns or worse reacting when they happen analytics could optimize the timing of maintenance scheduling to increase equipment reliability and minimize downtime. The shop floor could be supervised through IIOT integration and perhaps a tablet displaying critical operations and/or production data making it easier to monitor production.

4. It is all about collecting and managing and storing lots and lots of Data.

There is no doubt that with Industry 4.0 comes the availability of unprecedented production levels of data. It is not enough just to have data available or to gather that data. Neither is volumes of data the secret sauce. You have to take the time to understand the data, understand what is meaningful to your business (a problem to solve) then engineer features in the data to expose that. Artificial Intelligence will not be able to extrapolate what matters to your business.

Connecting industry 4.0 data to business insight and strategy exposed by predictive analytics is 80% of the effort involved. Business driven management and planning approaches that identify opportunities and strategies are essential to leveraging and keeping up with the market.

It is all about leveraging data to develop insights that solve business problems. It is all about optimizing your business by enabling and empowering the people that run that business with the tools of Industry 4.-0.

Conclusion

Industry 4.0 is like any other revolution from the steam engine to electricity and then the computer. The capability and tools come along to accelerate business and free up people to do the kinds of creative things we are best at. No one ever built a steam engine just to move a locomotive down the track, there were trade goods and people to move long distances. No one ever built a connected device for a manufacturing facility just to collect data and report. There is an optimization of the manufacturing to be found in analysing that data for clear minded decisions. Faster, better, cheaper, safer and more profitable.

Is your business taking advantage of the opportunities of the data residing in your equipment?