Alf van Rensburg is an innovative Electrical Engineer, manager and a multi-disciplinary generalist.
Manufacturing Productivity in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
The goal is to make money now, and in the future[1].
In an environment of manufacturing productivity stagnation and low wages growth, the goal is becoming ever harder to achieve.
Leading manufacturers have exhausted the possibilities of the current state of industrial technology and are pursuing the upward trajectory of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
While many more manufacturers still have much to gain from fully exploiting information technology and automation. The Third Industrial Revolution, this amalgam of information and telecommunications will soon be obsolete as ‘smart’ systems accelerate the pace of business.
Consider how the Digital Revolution has changed your life. The ubiquitous technology we carry in our pocket gives us instant access to a world of knowledge, a sea of services, a cornucopia of goods, all customised for our individual consumption no matter where we are. This is the peak of the Third Industrial Revolution with ever faster computers, an explosion of information and seamless telecommunications.
This third industrial revolution has spawned monoliths like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google [FANG], who collectively know us better than we know ourselves and have made a commodity of us.
This same group, along with the likes of Microsoft and industrial companies such as Siemens and Schneider Electric, are in the vanguard of the newest industrial revolution. One in which the data and communications are no longer passive. Machines are becoming intelligent, able to analyse their own data, seek new patterns of behaviour and extrapolate future performance blurring the boundary between digital and physical systems.
Customers now want the equivalent of their personal experience in their business dealings. A business which cannot provide this sophisticated relationship with a customer risks becoming a commodity, with price their only product differentiator.
Unlike the cyber realm of computers and their applications, manufacturing processes have not experienced significant change, nor have the basic machines which drive physical and chemical transformations.
Product differentiation and manufacturing productivity must now be driven by a deeper understanding of known processes and a sophisticated application of machine controls.
Customers want to be provided with minute-by-minute access to the status and quality of their order. Manufacturers need to lower unit costs, accommodate changing customer demands and become agile in adapting to supplier and logistic changes.
The third industrial revolution has run its course, we see manufacturing in stagnation and we’ve reached a plateau in productivity from the application of information and telecommunications.
The fourth industrial revolution is accelerating with the advent of the Internet of Things [IoT], machine learning and big data mining, underpinned by cloud computing. The sheer scale of this ‘smart’ revolution, and the melding of the digital world with the physical world is producing strange new technologies whose application we have yet to imagine.
[1] The Goal, Eli Goldratt