Preparing Your Company for Industry 4.0!

Preparing your company for Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is a hot trend that is continually helping to increase efficiencies in manufacturing and many manufacturing companies are actively looking for ways to adopt it in their own operations.

The potential gains for any production operation are significant, but there are also some requirements to be observed before attempting to implement Industry 4.0 practices in a manufacturing facility.

If you want to ensure that you will be able to take advantage of Industry 4.0 trends with minimal hassle, there are a few things you should do in preparing your company for Industry 4.0.

Understand Manufacturing Production Issues You’re Trying to Address

First, you should realize that Industry 4.0 is not a “magic wand” that will solve all your company’s production problems in one go. It’s a combination of intelligent factories where various technologies work together on specific problems.

Applying them to a situation properly starts with identifying specific problems. Make a list of everything that you want to address about your current production. For example, you might want to boost your overall output, or reduce the error rate in a specific step.

Sometimes you might also be interested in automating the facility as much as possible and reducing the need for human operators. Whatever your goals are, you have to organize them in a concise manner. 

Identify Specific Solutions That Can Help Address Those Issues

Next, go through current solutions that Industry 4.0 offers and figure out which of them can fit into your current situation. Once you know what specific problems you’re trying to solve, finding solutions for them should be relatively straightforward.

Make a list of specific features that you want to include and see how that list aligns with the current state of your manufacturing facilities. Remember, sometimes you might be unable to use a specific solution if it requires technology that you don’t have at the moment. More on that below.

Have a Detailed Plan

The next step is to come up with a detailed plan of action, and identify potential problems along the way. Remember that this will be a complicated process that requires many different factors to align properly, and it will take a while to get things done right.

Make sure that you know what to expect at every step of the way and try to have some backup ideas in case things don’t work out exactly as you anticipated. Working with a specialist will go a long way towards minimizing those problems, and it will also help you ensure that your company is properly set up for the future.

Ensure Everyone in Your Company Is on the Same Page

New technology always requires training, and even if you’re already familiar with Industry 4.0 trends, you can’t guarantee the same for all your current employees. You should do your best to bring everyone up to speed as early as possible, ideally even before you’ve started integrating those solutions into your workflow in the first place.

People will need time to get used to doing things in a new way, and there will be issues and questions to resolve. The more time you set aside for that, the smoother the whole process will be.

Is Your Infrastructure Up to Date?

As we mentioned above, a very important point to cover is to ensure that your infrastructure can actually support the solutions you’re investing in. Industry 4.0 has some fundamental requirements that you’ll need to align with, and sometimes it might require a significant investment on your part.

Make sure that you’re prepared for that, because once you’ve got the ball rolling, you can’t easily backtrack. You’ll need to verify every part of your operations carefully, ideally with the help of someone with experience in the field.

The Benefits of Professional Guidance

And that brings us to our closing point. No matter what you do and what kinds of solutions you’re planning to integrate in your company, always do that with the help of a professional who understands the field and can guide you through it with confidence.

Industry 4.0 is a rapidly evolving field, and it takes a lot of expertise to understand it in enough detail to make qualified decisions in an organization and in preparing your company for Industry 4.0. Doing this on your own is often a bad idea, because you’re going to miss many important points that might have significant implications in the long term.

If you already have some problems on your mind that could potentially be resolved with Industry 4.0 solutions, you should waste no time in exploring the field further. The earlier you integrate this into your manufacturing workflow, the more it will decrease maintenance and save costs in the future.

This is especially true for a field like this, where new solutions keep coming out on a regular basis, sometimes making older ones obsolete along the way. Keeping up with the current state of the field can be difficult enough on its own even after you’ve integrated it into your operations. 

Preparing your company for Industry 4.0 article and permission to publish here provided by Krasimir Hristov. Originally written for Supply Chain Game Changer and published on March 28, 2022.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.