Digital transformation in the age of Industry 4.0

You may have heard of industry 4.0 or manufacturing 4.0 or even industry 5.0 - but that last topic is for another newsletter. The idea today is to explore the concept of Industry 4.0 a little more.

Companies have already understood the importance of Industry 4.0 to digitally transform their processes. In the asset management scenario, I always talk about the digitization of maintenance. How is it possible to use existing technologies to make maintenance activities more agile and managed in real time.

But do you know how to actually implement Industry 4.0 within your company?

Proper planning of the steps necessary for this implementation, considering the existing industrial legacy in Brazilian industries, is essential to extract the most from Industry 4.0.

Digital transformation is a megatrend that accompanies the industry in the world and in Brazil in the coming years. However in the Brazilian industrial segment, including the part of services, there are challenges and problems faced by entrepreneurs in the country.

Today, in our country, we have a lot of outdated industrial processes and equipment, especially when compared to countries like the United States or Germany, especially in sectors such as oil and gas, mining and textiles, automotive, food and beverage.

This makes the first step in process digitization the combination of physical and digital technologies with a focus on modernizing machines, equipment and infrastructure.

Implementing process digitization using the new technologies that exist in Industry 4.0 requires the adoption of some important steps. They must be followed to avoid unnecessary investments. Let's go to them:

1. Priorities – it is important to evaluate your industry and start where it will be possible to bring more results in the short and medium term;

2. Strategies – prioritization makes it easier to define the strategies and technologies used to improve the efficiency of internal and external processes;

3. Solutions – select solutions – software and hardware – that can be more assertive and adaptable to your business rules. At this stage, when we talk about technology, some points are important to remember: flexibility, scalability and capacity and integration between systems.

With digital transformation, efficiency gains, better use of equipment and greater operational safety are inevitable.

In this way, complex processes such as predictive maintenance will become simple, according to each need. Using artificial intelligence, for example, for effective data control, is already helping companies to gain more space in the market and more resilience within the market in which they operate.

The most important point is for companies to define the objectives with implementing Industry 4.0, such as:

- Real-time remote management of mobile maintenance teams that can have their service logistics optimized;

- The definition of business rules that, analyzed by intelligent algorithms, can trigger specialized technicians with minimal intervention;

- Collection of operational parameters that can measure and correlate variables that help to make proactive intervention decisions;

- Use of applications that can reduce time in routine and repetitive activities and allow the use of that time in intelligent data analysis;

- Increase in the productivity of teams through the mobility of information in cloud computing systems, among other countless possibilities.

In 2018, I had an international experience in an automotive industry in Canada where we showed a team of maintenance technicians how they could reduce work time on checklist actions and filling out machine ledgers, and focus saved time on data analysis to define failure state prevention actions.

Defining the work performed, every day, on a line with over 50 robots and auxiliary machines, the steps were:

1. Select the checklist to be performed that day;

2. Print the checklist on sheets and sheets of paper;

3. Go to the line and follow the checklist, checking the planned points and reporting non-conformities;

4. Performed the checklist in the field, return to the workstation and enter all the information in the checklist;

5. Print the final report;

6. Get back on track with this report;

7. And finally, register the non-conformities found in the machine ledger of each machine for later resolution.

After understanding and experiencing this routine in the field, through an asset management system and mobile application, the time dedicated to activities (which used to be a full day, ?eight hours), was reduced by half. The new steps:

1. Access the mobile application and select the scanned checklist;

2. Go to the line and follow the checklist, checking the planned points and reporting non-conformities;

3. Close the checklist in the mobile app and return to the workstation.

4. Ready, all information has been registered in the system. The digital machine ledger was generated and non-conformities have generated maintenance orders and were forwarded to those responsible for treatment.

?This is a small example of how the digitization of processes using technologies provided in this era of industry 4.0 can generate productivity and offer time for more important activities such as data analysis.

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