Episode 9: Ensuring business value from your Industry 4.0 investments

Embracing new opportunities

Industry 4.0, or what many call the 4^th Industrial Revolution follows the Mechanization in the Steam powered era, the “Henry Ford Mass Assembly” era supported by the use of electricity, and the Computer Assisted and Automation era.  Industry 4.0, is fundamentally focused on bringing together the Physical world to the Cyberworld to gain new insights into processes, as well as introducing new technologies such as:

• Augmented Reality to simulate design and manufacturing in order to test designs and processes before they begin in production; thus speeding New Product Introduction Cycles and avoiding costly production problems like defects and machining or assembly problems.
• Additive Manufacturing (or 3D Printing) to perform rapid prototyping, complex part manufacturing, and spare part creation.
• Co-Bots designed to physically interact with humans in a shared workspace in order to supplement workloads.
• Artificial Intelligence used to aid workers in process set-up, run and troubleshooting activities, and to aid manufacturing in future machine learning activities when combined with data lakes and “big data” initiatives.

In all cases, these new technologies are designed for process improvement and they all have one common thread, data-driven systems that all require some level of “cyber” connectivity to achieve that “uber process improvement” everyone seeks.

Taking into account the need for digital functionality of all of these technologies, and the future data workloads these systems will demand, Cisco is in a unique position to enable the adoption and integration of these new systems into a manufacturers business system securely and at massive scale.

In this episode we will reveal the best practices for adoption and integrations. Given the evolutions of manufacturing and the associated technologies with the various eras in manufacturing, adopting and integrating these technologies into current operations can get complex and costly if not executed wisely.  As such, there is a need for more than just technology to realize the benefits of “The 4^th Industrial Revolution”.

• Improve daily workflows and activities
• Accurately measure Time To Value of our digital investments
• Choose the right partners to guide you through
• Learn how to transform your initiatives into strategic business investments

[Excerpt from Realizing Industry 4.0 by Carlos Rojas Click here to read the full blog]

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Featured guest:

Research & Insights

Check out the featured resources mentioned in this episode:

• Embracing Industry 4.0 and Rediscovering Growth
• Look ahead: What Industry 4.0 trends can we expect in 2020?
• 5 Industrial Connectivity Trends Driving the IT OT Convergence

Additional Resources

• Cisco Manufacturing Portfolio Explorer
• Industry 4.0: How Cisco is enabling the future of Manufacturing
• Bottled Better: Coca-Cola’s Connected Factory Approach 
• Visit our website to see all available episodes

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