“The Global Visions Community Horasis Extraordinary Meeting on the United States of America Virtual Event, 18 March, 2021 06.30-23.00 US Eastern Time”
Industry 4.0: From Initiative to Imperative
Industry 4.0: From Initiative to Imperative
Industrial development segues naturally into level 4.0 wherein computers, automation and autonomy work coherently. How to blend and apply technologies that are blurring the lines between the physical and cyber-physical and which must interlock with home-workers? And how can America spearhead Industry 4.0 in order to be competitive and relevant in the international equation, thus overcoming the many challenges of COVID-19?
One point I’d like to make is that cybersecurity and cyber resilience become even more important as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies.
e.g. with work-from-home, the confidentiality of online discussions is even more important. And the availability of communication platforms is even more essential.
Cybersecurity is a relatively easy sell, but resilience is hard since the benefits of preparing or costs of not preparing are not immediate.
e.g. I estimate a 1-10% chance that over a 10 year period the public-key cryptography underpinning our digital systems will collapse. This may have been an acceptable risk in the 1990s, but it’s not acceptable now, and it’s even more unacceptable in a decade as we are even more vulnerable to cyber attacks and collapse of digital infrastructures (driverless cards, connected implanted medical devices, greater work-from-home, etc). Yet, if it weren’t for the quantum threat to public-key cryptography, nothing would likely change.
Preparing digital systems to be secure against quantum attacks gives us a chance (beyond just defending against known quantum attacks) to prepare digital systems to be more resilient to unexpected attacks of the future.
We need to find economic models/incentives for resilience-by-design.
Michele
The workforce as we know it is about to change forever. Automation and advances in AI will lead to massive job loss and crippling economic effects unless companies and countries take immediate action to prepare their workforce for the future. While many companies focus solely on technology updates, preparing the workforce is equally important, as two-thirds of technology implementations fail to produce the desired results because the users are not ready to work with this technology.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Work report has determined that the workforce of the future needs two types of skills: personal skills (such as creativity, resilience, ability to learn, and stress management) and technical skills (such as technology use, design and monitoring). Fortunately, there are clear steps companies can take in order to take the 85M workers who are facing job loss and prepare them for the 97M new roles being created by technology.
Jennifer Thomé
Content Marketing Manager
Ø Global Supply Chain(GSC) disruption –during covid and post covid current phase, globally, companies have seen disruption in supply chains. Countries want to near shore/realign vendors politically. MNCs want to create new robust GSC that eliminates future disruptions
Ø Companies & countries, will need to create a strong manufacturing base, with foundation of manufacturing excellence, with emphasis on Lean, digitalisation, people re skilling and more ,to create efficient productive manufacturing and supply chains, to deliver at required quality On Time
Ø Huge focus on Industry 4.0 by each company, each country ,is needed .In fact, we need to be ready for Industry 5.0, the higher level of collaboration between man & machine
Ø We need global alignment to implement Industry 4.0
Ø World Economic Forum has an initiative Lighthouses , focused on Industry 4.0 execution ,on digitalisation is at 54 sites. Global companies participating include Renault,Siemens,Unilever,Sandvik,Bosch,Schneider,Tata Steel
The initial results, improvements seen are very encouraging
Ø Alibaba very recently announced ,that they had completed secret three year project, to create most advanced digital advanced plant in world. It made apparel. Company is Xunxi Digital.
Now Alibaba wants to roll out the results across all factories in China . That’s ambition
Ø The digital factory that we must create will be a convergence of technology including :
I4
IOT
AR
AM
AI
People reskilling
Robotics
Automation
And more
Today, from my visits to several companies in many countries, we are nowhere near ready with I4, anywhere in the world . We need a global movement to implement I4 & more. This is really Imperative. Time is running out.
Viren Joshi
Executive Vice Chairman
Sigma Electric Manufacturing Corporation
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The coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak exposed the limited resilience of many manufacturers – in particular, their fragile supply chains, overdependence on human assets, and often insufficient agility. Indeed, with a global economic dynamic, further volatility expected, and investors growing more cautious, the need for manufacturing industries to step up performance – for them and for society – has never been greater.
It is imperative for Manufacturers to prepare – define and execute enterprise-wide strategies to embrace the possibilities of Industry 4.0 technological advances.
A recent benchmarking study in the CPG industry (more than 336,000 data points gathered from 327 production lines in 50 participating plants worldwide, employing more than 24,000 people in 9 industry sectors, and involving 500 participating manufacturing professionals) exposed important findings that we all in the industry should seriously internalise.
For example, the fact that only 10% of the manufacturing operations are somewhat leveraging at scale technological I4.0 like solutions is a shocking finding to me. Leadership capability and organizational readiness identified as 2 of the main barriers for progress. This without talking about identified gaps in the areas of data led maintenance, quality, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, insufficient use of augmented reality, data analytics etc… all representing huge opportunities…
I would like to make a call to action. We ought to deliver way more responsive, agile and fit operations.
There has been enough lighthouse efforts, pilots and isolated studies… nowadays, there are methodologies and services available to define the path forward and accelerate progress… a serious look at the path forward is essential.
Gustavo Ghory