Leaner & Robust Process Before Industry 4.0

The world is fast embracing Industry 4.0 or I4.0. 4.0 it refers to a new revolutionary phase in the industry focus has been on Interconnectivity, Automation, Artificial intelligence, Big data & Machine Learning & IoT. It is also known as Smart Manufacturing.

We have seen a glimpse of Industry 4.0 concepts for quite some time. Be it an Aeroplane put in Autopilot mode, automatically driven cars, or automated manufacturing or processing lines. Scale and magnitude and use of the new technologies may be extensive in 4.0, but the fundamentals remain the same to make it flexible & increase efficiency with the involvement of technology.

The Automotive and Automobile industries have adopted automated manufacturing practices from ages famously known as Auto lines. A piston manufacturing company right in Bengaluru had built a fully automated line way back in 2005 wherein raw material enters from one side of the line, and it comes as a finished product neatly assembled in a container at the end of the line. Bosch manufacturing has numerous such examples in India and all over the world,?built with perfection. Engineers were able to achieve this through the basics of electronics, Sensors, Programming, small-scale Robots, and PLCs. As a young Engineer, I remember programming a very intelligent state-of-the-art Balancing machine that was fully automated and had built-in concepts of Artificial Intelligence to calculate static balancing and dynamic balancing and take appropriate action, even before Artificial Intelligence came into the limelight. A similar explanation can be given to food processing, pharma industry as well

While automation was entirely possible then, but some of the automation (digitization) efforts are failing even today. What is the difference, despite the advancement in technology we are not able to achieve what we had achieved many years back without the technology?

The answer is Process Robustness. Be it autopilot / automated cars / automatic lines one who was able to achieve automation successfully were the one who had built a reliable and robust process less likely to fail. If a poor process is digitized either it would be a weaker digitized process & fails, or it would consume a humongous amount of effort & revenue to put the control in place which makes the digitization exercise a costlier one.

While some of the thought leaders are arguing that Industry 4.0 would help Lean Six Sigma implementation easier as it provides a lot of data to analyze, which otherwise difficult in manufacturing to capture. While I agree with their argument,

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Looking forward to your thoughts.