Smart Factory

the return to the future of italian manufacturing

2 minutes reading - Published : 15 Gen, 2019 @ 11:47 by Andrea Ruscica

Technologies are only the means to an end, not the end in itself of this Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is proving to be an authentic cultural leap, an epoch-making transition from a traditional economic model, characterized by the highest efficiency of means of production for mass production built to stock, to a Digital and Business Transformation aimed at creating conditions for the success and competitiveness of industry, thanks to a connected and integrated infrastructure supporting the entire value chain of the company. Let’s see how.

Altea was set up 25 years ago and, whether it was a mere coincidence or an extraordinary concurrence, this was the same year in which the World Wide Web became free, thanks to the CERN which chose to release the code for its free public use. What kicked off the “network of networks” was the start of a revolution or something even better than a revolution. It is quite likely that, if this had not happened 25 years ago, today we would not be witnessing one of the most fascinating revolutions of the modern age. The Web would have remained locked up in some university department; top IT scholars would have gathered around these research centres to promote experimentation on behalf of the few powerful companies able to afford it and for most people, the “Internet” would have no significance whatsoever. Instead, 25 years from the birth of the WWW, we are able to witness the countless services which have sprung up on the Web and today we are experiencing our Return to the Future: the tour around the Smart Factory starts here.

Smart Technologies, Smart Manufacturing, Digital Industry, Industry 4.0. Terms recently coined to indicate the journey undertaken by manufacturing companies projected towards the future.

“In Industry 4.0’s vision of the future, plants, workers, incoming materials and end products will be endowed with sensors for their identification and for constantly detecting their position, state and activity. The data collected will be analyzed to improve manufacturing capacity, efficiency, safety and operational continuity. Operators will be assisted in their work tasks thanks to collaborative robots and new man-machine interfaces which will strengthen both executive and decisional capacities. The entire factory will be connected to the rest of the logistic-production system and to customers by means of cloud platforms. Data relating to product use will be utilized to facilitate post-sales assistance, the development of new products/services and the enablement of new business models in an innate manner.”

[Source “Industria 4.0: Tecnologie e quadro applicativo.” Ricerca 2017, Osservatori.net Milan Polytechnic]

But is this really a vision of the future or are we already experiencing this reality?

In a study carried out by Milan Polytechnic dated 2017, the y2y comparison of the level of innovation reached by Italian manufacturing companies revealed a noticeable increase in the application of so-called Industry 4.0 technologies. These are transformational technologies which cover the entire lifecycle of a product/service and optimise, rethink and revolutionize manufacturing/logistic processes in a digital key.

They are called Smart Technologies because the contribution of the cognitive component is increasingly important and central. “Intelligent machines that think differently from us”, to quote Kevin Kelly who adds – yet another quote from his book “The Inevitable” – “In a highly connected world, thinking differently is a form of innovation and wealth.” It is to the appearance of digital thought that we owe the driving force of our future.

We have triggered a new creativity based on the human-tech partnership; we could define it as a cognitive intelligence that enables new ways of designing, producing and distributing manufacturing products. Click To Tweet

Now that 2018 is well underway, we are facing an experience of Industry 4.0 with greater awareness with regard to the maturity of the solutions and technologies driving the Smart Factory.

Smart execution: manufacturing technologies and information management

In the age of the Digital Factory, there is a comeback of the Extended Enterprise concept: company boundaries are being reconsidered in the light of a physical and virtual environment, inside which all assets are integrated and connected to facilitate cooperation and to optimize the use of resources. It is an ecosystem which comprises internal company resources as well as external ones, such as suppliers and customers (who can interact throughout the entire production-logistic process). The architecture enabling the logic of Smart Manufacturing is a powerful cloud platform hosting integration services, and the management/ exchange of information.

Cloud Manufacturing: Cloud Computing applied to Manufacturing. Thanks to the computational capacity we have reached and the agility of IT infrastructures, it is possible to enable widespread and easy network access on demand to a set of shared and configurable manufacturing resources. The transition from mass production to personalized production of a type that is customer-centric and increasingly efficient is nothing but routine business for the smart factories which set out in this way to improve the quality of the output produced and to assure themselves a competitive business model. It is therefore a question of making a formerly standardized manufacturing process flexible; product variants are no longer the exception, everything is configurable according to personal needs and preferences. Hence the orientation towards Cloud Manufacturing, also known as Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS), which is already a reality for certain pioneering plants: manufacturing resources are virtualized and encapsulated in cloud services whose management is nevertheless centralized; the inter-factory environment supports the integration of requests coming from various suppliers, while also handling any attached specifications and the transfer of department data; a high level of traceability is complied with (thanks to iIoT technologies) and there is a distribution of quality management. A front-end system supports product configuration with advanced design and engineering interfaces. The Lifecycle becomes Smart and continues for the entire product life: the after-sales data collected will be useful to the company for optimizing future performance and designing better products/ services.

What about the future? Manufacturing plants offered as a service. To produce an article, production services are purchased from the Cloud, choosing the most suitable resources for resolving specific requirements in compliance with quality and at the… Click To Tweet

The power of Smart Technologies has already started to revolutionize Digital Factory production lines. We are witnessing an increasingly intensive use of touch screen technology, for monitoring the advancement of production and supplying useful insights to operators. Augmented Reality visors have now become routine work devices (widely used for example to send machine maintenance and repair instructions, on any production site and at any time). The use of wearable devices enables the acquisition of new data and direct interaction with machinery, by communicating the position of the people operating on the machines and exchanging information with the entire ecosystem. These are examples of Advanced Human-Machine Interfaces, applications developed to back up operations and enable maximum integration, collaboration and cooperation between man and machine, able to acquire or transmit vocal, tactile and visual data and endowed with an unprecedented Digital Experience.

Intelligent Business Apps: the intelligent ERPs which unleash the power of information

An experience that is user-assisted and conversational (chatbots), systems of interaction based on Natural Language Processing, mobile-first applications, a user experience designed for data immediacy and more reliable decision-making, the integration of information all along the smart supply chain and a cloud infrastructure to support business dimensions. These are the characteristics of an intelligent ERP, a new generation management software which unleashes the maximum potential of data and supports the hyper connected business of the Digital Factory, involving all physical, virtual and human capital assets.

They are called Intelligent Business Apps to underline the central role played by Artificial Intelligence: the algorithms of machine learning which make up the technological brain of the ERPs are trained by man to manage events and to automate processes on a large scale. An example? The ERP receives a new customer order, a product that is customized and configured to customer specifications. The prototyping phase is automatically activated, thanks to Additive Manufacturing technologies. The ERP records the customer’s approval to proceed and consequently implements the schedulation of the production lines, the request to purchase components (or the 3D printing of the required parts), and even the transmission of information to the operator on board the machine (whether a person or a robot) to monitor the manufacturing process and follow its advancement. In the future, for each new order, the digital mind of the ERP will have a benchmark regarding similar processes and this will help reduce lead times and make for more reliable manufacturing decisions.

Are we really so far from the future factory concept? I personally believe that this is an inevitable transformation because it is already happening. We are ready to welcome the future in the making.

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BIO

For almost 30 years, Altea Federation has been working alongside the global leaders of technological innovation through a holonic-virtual business model which embraces the professional approach and high degree of specialization of a federation of companies under one brand: different yet complementary worlds which reinforce each other while preserving a strong Group identity and an unmistakable approach to the challenges posed by new paradigms in the ambits of Consulting, Technology, Digital and Operations.