Industry 4.0 – Tech Trends Driving Innovation in Manufacturing

Driving Innovation In Manufacturing
Industry 4.0 – Tech Trends

© 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Industry is currently going through a period of change that has been labeled the fourth
industrial revolution – or Industry 4.0. Previous industrial revolutions brought us
machinery, electricity, and computers. This fourth industrial revolution is shaping up to be
even more transformational than the previous ones as we move into the age of smart
interconnected machines and intelligent automation.
Manufacturing, in particular, is an industry that is going through tremendous change.
Many manufacturers are embracing digital transformation. They are finding ways to grow
by building smarter products, as well as harnessing the power of data and analytics to
switch to service models, creating new revenue streams. Just as significantly, they are
leveraging new technology trends such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things
(IoT), and cloud computing to streamline their own business processes, reduce costs and
become more competitive.

This was the topic of a conversation I had recently with Eric Prevost, Oracle's VP for
manufacturing, automotive, and industry strategy. With more than 20 years of
experience overseeing digital transformation at companies including IBM and
Capgemini, Prevost is well-positioned to talk about the opportunities and
challenges that businesses are facing in this field.
We started off by covering the three major opportunities that are driving
transformation. First, there’s the potential for companies to accelerate their rate of
innovation and bring new products and services into the market more quickly
because digitally connected value-chains provide instant feedback on product
performance and customer satisfaction, creating a closed-loop for market
performance all the way back to the engineering process.

The second opportunity allows businesses to become much more data-driven. This
means using data to inform decision-making that becomes more accurate – and also
allows for better forecasting and a shift towards new paradigms such as predictive
maintenance and automation of processes such as logistics, inventory, production
planning.
And the third opportunity allows businesses, regardless of whether they are B2B or B2C,
to fundamentally change the relationships they have with customers. This ranges across
everything from established sales and after-sales transactional relationships to new
subscription and as-a-service customer offerings. It means businesses can get a far better
understanding of how their customers are using and interacting with their products and
take a more accurate measure of "customer experience." This also leads to more accurate
and valuable product renewal or upgrade - an increasingly important factor for any
business today.

Acting on all of these opportunities can be done by leveraging a number of emerging
technology trends. Cloud and high-performance computing give businesses the ability to
build more accurate, high-resolution models of their products, services, and operations.
The cloud-based, pay-as-you-go nature of these services means they are often affordable
even for SMEs, provides them best practice as well as advanced analytical models such as
the digital twin are no longer only available to large, well-resourced global organizations.
Closely related to this trend are new technologies that allow us to better understand data.
Here we talked about the Internet of Things (IoT), which enables connections and data-
sharing between huge numbers of networked devices, as well as artificial intelligence (AI)
and data science.

"I separate those because they can both be used in different ways – data science can include
AI, but a new generation of data science platforms can apply much deeper mathematical and
statistical analytics on data, even if it's not AI," Prevost tells me.
Another hugely important trend in manufacturing is the digitization of products themselves.
Most smart products today have an element that is not directly related to the physical or
mechanical aspects of the product. This software layer can be changed and updated without
having to go through expensive physical re-design and re-engineering processes. Often it is
key to the product's ability to collect and transmit data to help manufacturers better
understand how they are being used and what value they are providing to their customers.
Prevost says, “You can have a much more personalized product … an upgradeable product, you
have a much longer lifecycle while being able to bring some innovation to your customers
without having to change the physical and mechanical aspects. You can be much more
innovative with your customers.”

Manufacturing has moved quickly to adopt industry 4.0 thinking into its workflows.
Make-up brand L’Oreal brought its manufacturing processes to consumers, creating a
mini “smart factory” that can be deployed as a pop-up at shopping malls. Here,
customers can have personalized make-up products created for them while they wait,
which even come in personalized packaging. And sports goods manufacturer Adidas has
released a range of shoes that come with custom 3D-printed soles, molded to perfectly fit
the foot of every individual customer.
Prevost also spoke to me about a B2B electric equipment manufacturer that is a customer
of Oracle. By implementing IoT processes and other industry 4.0 technology, they have
been able to increase their manufacturing uptime by 60 percent and reduce the number
of manual processes by 55 percent, with a huge business impact. It has also been able to
reduce the amount of floor space required for its operations by 80 percent.

While at first, this might give rise to concerns about human redundancies, this isn't
necessarily the case, Prevost reasons. “When we move to automated factories, there’s
much more complexity to manage … [it needs] more people to design and maintain it,
and … create new business.”
As well as doing new things with existing data, the most innovative manufacturers are
looking beyond the traditional structured data sets they have been using and towards
entirely new datasets that they haven’t used before. A good example of using
unstructured data comes from a wind turbine manufacturer that, along with all the
regular data on operational efficiency, monitors social media chat to understand local
attitudes and opinions in areas that are under consideration for development. “This can
be very important to them for winning deals in some places,” Prevost tells me, “this is
very interesting to me because it's a new type of data they weren't getting in the past."

Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and a
strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies. He helps
organisations improve their business performance, use data more intelligently, and
understand the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data,
blockchains, and the Internet of Things.
LinkedIn has ranked Bernard as one of the world’s top 5 business influencers. He is a frequent
contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for Forbes. Every day
Bernard actively engages his 1.5 million social media followers and shares content that
reaches millions of readers.
Visit The
Website
© 2020 Bernard Marr , Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
© 2017 Bernard Marr , Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and a
strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies. He helps
organisations improve their business performance, use data more intelligently, and
understand the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data,
blockchains, and the Internet of Things.
LinkedIn has ranked Bernard as one of the world’s top 5 business influencers. He is a frequent
contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for Forbes. Every day
Bernard actively engages his 1.5 million social media followers and shares content that
reaches millions of readers.
Visit The
Website

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Industry 4.0 – Tech Trends Driving Innovation in Manufacturing

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