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As usual, December and January blogs and newsletters have been full of predictions for the coming year. There seems to be a consensus, among pundits at least, that so-called manufacturing 4.0 will become more real and more widespread in 2016.
So, what is manufacturing 4.0?
The transition of manufacturing from cottage industry to organized factories in the time of the Industrial Revolution (mid-19th century) is considered to be manufacturing 1.0. The mid-20th century evolution of computerized support for planning, quality and customer service is marked as manufacturing 2.0 along with process and quality improvement initiatives like lean manufacturing and six sigma.
Data integration across the enterprise is the hallmark of manufacturing 3.0 with ERP and the integration of design, quality and supply chain operations into comprehensive data sharing and collaboration.
I have not found a concise, accepted definition of Manufacturing 4.0, but the consensus seems to be focused on big data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and further automation of production (robotics, 3D printing).
It takes no great stretch of the imagination to predict that these emerging technologies will continue to grow and pervade more manufacturers’ plants and organizations in the year ahead. I think the more important prediction is that more smaller manufacturers will employ these tools to improve processes and quality, increase responsiveness to changing demand, and more effectively compete with larger companies that have invested far more in technology as these new tools have entered the market. Put another way, IoT and analytics are coming out of the market introduction stage and entering the growth phase of their lifecycles and that means prices are coming down. As with other electronic and technical products, price drops can be startling when products move from early testing to massive production.
The biggest challenge for smaller companies in adopting new tools and technologies is the human side – training internal resources to handle and benefit from the technologies and/or finding new employees to bring on board to help.
An interesting related phenomenon is also gaining traction at the same time – a rapidly growing move to cloud ERP. The interesting part is that your best IT people are freed from the routine care and feeding of the ERP hardware and software so they can spend their time in direct support of the user community including the installation and exploitation of IoT and analytics, among other things.
