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What's Industry 4.0 ("i4.0")
Industry 4.0 isn't a new technology, nor can it be a new business structure. It's our society's current trend of information automation and exchange in the development and creation of new technologies.
It is simply an acknowledgment that technology had advanced so much since the 19th century, in which we saw the beginnings of mass manufacturing.
| 1st Revolution | 2nd Revolution | 3rd Revolution | Industry 4.0 |
| Factory Production | Mass Production / Assembly Line | Digital Automation | Smart-Systems / Cyber-Physical Systems |
The Revolutions
The First and Second Industrial Revolutions
From the 19th century, we witnessed Britain transfer from farming to a commercial business, focusing on factory production.
The Second Revolution, also introduced mass manufacturing and steel. Factories were becoming more 'electric,' giving birth to Henry Ford's assembly manufacturing line, allowing for voluminous production and mass distribution to come into play.
The Third Industrial Revolution
The third revolution is where our country went "digital." Until the 1950's, technology functioned on a analog, mechanical, and electronic scale.
Industry 4.0
Since the 1970's, we have become more and more digital, moving closer to fully digitizing our culture, whether it's smart house urges to smart safety systems.
Industry 4.0 uses the Internet of Things ("IoT) to enhance factories, so turning them "smart." Within this arrangement, we allow for the development of "cyber-physical" processes, mechanisms monitored by closely integrated algorithms and software, which replicate the physical systems onto a virtual network that makes decentralized decisions. With the introduction of the Internet of Things ("IoT"), both cyber-physical systems are able to work and communicate together, supplying users with real-time method interactions.
The industry
This new era is appealing to those businesses whose business civilization is reading, prepared, and able to receive the effects of the digital-age development.
Rather than investing time and energy in raising awareness to firms who aren't prepared for the change, or simply, aren't comfortable making the shift, the target then shifts on those entities who see themselves flourishing and growing, because of the progress. But, it's a double-edged sword, since it's very important to know these companies who aren't making the switch, and why they are not.
Enter The i4.0 Dimensions
There are six measurements that makeup i4.0--Technology, Finance & Risk Management, Employees & Competencies, Systems & Processes, and Services & Networks.
This guide will concentrate strictly on the tech dimension.
Demand-driven supply chain
We need more. Society wants longer. The rapid advancement of this technology industry is all but impossible to continue.
Every time people as a user buy one apparatus, the next model is currently on its way out six weeks down the line. Within an Industry 4.0 circumstance, the demand for fresh and "smarter" technologies is increasing exponentially. However, since we have seen over the last calendar year, in regards to investing in new technologies, we're also investing in the likelihood of getting our private and financial information endangered.
A dialogue for another time. At the end of the afternoon, society wants larger, better, faster. Sometimes smaller.
"By automating the business, we're talking everything from self-driving trucks, to supply-chain control applications," explained Tony Uphoff, President, and CEO of Thomas.
Whether it's smart manufacturing, or clever warehousing, the capability to pack and send items using this advanced technology, which makes supply exponentially more effective. Uphoff suggested in cases of warehousing, adding "intelligent" capabilities to it, would provide for things to be located faster and reduce error rates.
Big Data
In response to a massive amount of data breaches, most recently with Facebook, the industry could help provide a comprehensive evaluation of where we stand as it comes to our management and production systems.
Pulling data from our production gear systems, studying about the time, energy, expenses, and downsides to using them supplies valuable details. In the conclusion of the day, pc servers only have a lot better. Investing in blockchain where large chunks of information could be migrated to computer systems built for its own storage, could free-up time, space, and electricity from a number of these systems.
This permits entrepreneurs to have a step back and then shift their attention more towards the core of the company, as well as their clients. Ultimately, this will help incentivize real-time decision making, on both people part and the systems end.
Cloud
Ah, the large, scary cloud which everybody is scared of. Rather than uploading personal and financial info into the cloud, we are seeking to this blockchain, in which encryption is crucial and we do not need to think about other parties randomly obtaining keys or passwords.
Corporate officers or those needed to possess such info, are able to have part of a secret or passcode, providing them access to machine information and its performance aspects. For legal purposes, this could also come in handy as it pertains to exchange secrets. Assessing the unpredictability of cloud-based computing forces cloud technology to improve and upgrade functionality and security.
At the close of the evening, safety will always be at the heart of the subject, ensuring that information is not discharged, marketed, or spread to other companies (Cambridge Analytica(a cough) without consent.
Cyber-security
With new technologies, comes new cyber-security dangers. The need to safeguard computer and digital infrastructure have never been more essential.
Having a decentralized system that is heavily encrypted allows for lots of our exploitation fears, settle. The aims with Business 4.0 will need to concentrate on ensuring personal and financial information, associated with businesses as well as its own officials are well-guarded.
Additive manufacturing
Businesses are only starting to use additive manufacturing, like 3-D printing, in most instances of prototypes and generating individual parts.
"This radically reduces the period exerted, from design to prototyping, and ultimately trickles down to the marketplace," explained Uphoff.
Autonomous Robotics
Skynet. Just kidding. In all seriousness, robots will gradually learn how to socialize together, working safely, side-by-side together with people, and learn from them.
We don't have to be kept up at night wondering when a terminator was shipped back in time to kill us. By having this new field of robotics, the area of manufacturing will expand its capacities concerning inputting more efficiency into the company, and finally drive down costs for both the company and for investing in the technology itself.
Web of Things ("IoT")
IoT refers to countless physical apparatus across the world that are now linked to the internet, collecting, and sharing data.
Adding a level of electronic intelligence to devices that would otherwise be considered "dumb," enhancing technologies to communicate without human-human interaction, merges the physical world with the electronic world. Embedding these apparatus in computing enables not just individuals to interact together, but other technologies. This provides opportunities for a decentralization as it pertains to analytics and also "customer-support", allowing real time answers, with little to no lag period.
Augmented Reality
The integration of AR/VR into mobile gaming and even calculating has brought a new dimension to gaming. We have already begun to listen to the whispers of gambling and blockchain coming together.
From a business perspective, AR-based systems encourage various services which range from the cellular communications sector and warehousing. While still in its infancy stages, companies will start to expand their usage of AR since the systems are able to be incorporated into real-time decision making and work protocols.
Believe Black Mirror.
Adding Blockchain Into The Tech Dimension
Decentralization has been this year's trending notion in the financial sector. With the development of this blockchain along with cryptocurrency, internet-connected devices are much more vulnerable, because they are subject to being hijacked by hackers, and turned against its manufacturer to mine cryptocurrencies.
In the real-world, a theoretical assault would be a circumstance in which a hacker or group of hackers takes more than a community of related devices, using the computing power of those apparatus, to mine cash.
This doesn't come as a surprise that miners make their money depending on the purchase price of energy. In a previous interview, Halsey Minor, CNET founder and the driving force behind Salesforce.com, suggested that there is a market to be exploited, by focusing on networks and 'zombie devices,' and using their power to help decrease distribution expenses, all while boosting innovation.
Minor's exploitation of this market throughout his most recent venture, as Founder and CEO of Live Planet Earth and Co-Founder of this VideoCoin Network, has been a force to be reckoned with, as he's capitalizing on a marketplace that's been sitting idle still to this day.
The Industry 4.0 blueprint sets out pathways and paths towards the ending destination of getting a completely digital venture.
In order to attain true digital transformation, then the market has to be receptive to getting it. As we're still experimenting with smart technology, IoT, cloud-computing, along with the beginning phases of AR/VR, we're on the roadway getting closer and closer to Industry 4.0.
In the close of the day, there is a big influence in both the B2C and B2B spaces. Together with B2C, the focus in on exploiting the energy between the customers home and personal life.
Smart home assistants like the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod, are making this possible. But with convenience and efficiency, comes the chance of data manipulation, which we've already seen in different cases together with Fitbit, Amazon, and now maybe devices linked to Facebook.
On the other hand, the B2B space is very different. In attempts to create "smart machines," the amount of automation requires advances in sensor technology, automation equipment, software, AI, and even teaching our machines to understand what things to do, to do it, and the best way to take action.
Again, the center of all this is the risk franchisees purchase into at the expense of its own data, as well as its customers.
We are at the beginning of a new age. The technologies Sustainable Industry 4.0 will continue to grow, and so will the possibility of the blockchain.
