24 The Essential Guide to Motors, Automation & Drives – 2015

Over 200 years ago, the firstindustrial revolution began in theUK, using water and steam to

power to mechanise manufacturingprocesses. Within another 100 years,electricity revolutionised the massproduction of goods and by the 1970selectronics and computing helped makethe leap to automated manufacturing.Now we are predicting the nextrevolutionary step in manufacturing –Industry 4.0, a title reminiscent ofsoftware versioning that represents thefourth industrial revolution. But it’s aconcept that is often bundled up withseveral other industry buzz words,trying to figure out exactly what it is andwhere it fits.

And so we hear a variety of termssuch as Industry 4.0, smartmanufacturing, the connected factory,

the Internet of Things, Big Data orMachine-to-Machine, and we explorethe similarities, the overlaps, and thelinks between these concepts.

I look at it as comparable to theemergence of the internet in the late1980s, a technical evolution that wouldeventually lead to a revolution incommunication, commerce and society.

At that time, people were similarlytrying to figure out these new termssuch as world wide web, cyberspace,internet and hypertext. In the days of theNetscape browser and 56K dial-upmodems, nobody could predict all theways in which the internet would changeour daily lives, but it was clear that thetechnology opened up a great deal ofpotential. I think this is where we arenow with Industry 4.0 – we are in theearly days of talking about what it meansnow and what possibilities it might openup in the future.

If I had to try and sum it up in onesentence:

“Industry 4.0 is a connected networkof people and technology that allowsmanufacturing to do the things wealready do better, faster and cheaperwhilst at the same time enabling us todevelop new things that were notpossible before.”

It is important to realise that it is aconcept, not a product or off-the-shelfpackage. It refers to connecting uppeople, devices, machines, products,material and systems, so that they cancommunicate effectively, access largeamounts of data, make autonomousdecisions and improve flexibility. It is aconvergence of the worlds of IT andautomation, integrating manufacturingsystems with material planning, resourcemanagement, enterprise systems and thesupply chain.

One of the aims of Industry 4.0 is toswitch the business model ofmanufacturing from mass production tomass customisation. Instead of placinglarge facilities in low labour costcountries and then shipping product

around the globe, it allows the flexibilityof “batch size = 1”, with manufacturingdistributed locally to where the customermarkets are.

This flexible manufacturing, withshorter lead times and customisedproducts will better serve the marketneeds. The increased productivity andreduction in energy and transport willallow higher wage economies to remaincompetitive. In the UK, we couldstimulate investment in new jobs and re-shored manufacturing capacity.

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGYSo the idea of an industrial revolutionraises an interesting question - Couldmanufacturing be disrupted in the sameway that the telecommunications,entertainment, retail and mediaindustries have been by the developmentin information technology?

An example of such disruptivetechnology is additive manufacturing,sometimes referred to as 3-D printing.Imagine designing your own customisedproduct and sending the file for printingat a local manufacturing centre. Is thisan opportunity for entrepreneurial SMEsto bring a different business model tomarket? In the same way that Amazondidn’t have physical bookshops when itstarted and Ocado didn’t have physicalgrocery shops, could a start-up breakinto custom manufacturing and becomea new household name?

The future holds some excitingpossibilities for industry in the UK, andthat future has already started. Theautomation technology largely existsalready and is being used inmanufacturing today. The technologywill continue to evolve, doing more withless and seamlessly communicating withthe systems around it. The revolutionwill be when connecting all theseprocesses, systems, machines, devicesand people leads to major changes inmanufacturing techniques andstrategies.Tel: 0207 642 8080

INDUSTRY 4.0 – THE FOURTHINDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONSteve Brambley, Deputy Director, Industrial Automation at GAMBICA looks at Industry 4.0,comparing it to the emergence of the internet in the late 1980s and looking at how it couldchange the manufacturing business model

GAMBICA: CONTROLS

GAMBICA is the Trade Association for Instrumentation,Control, Automation and Laboratory Technology in theUK. It has membership of over 200 companies includingthe major multinationals in the sector as well as smallerand medium sized companies.

The Association's primary objectives are to further thesuccessful development of the industry and to promotethe competitiveness and profitability of membercompanies.

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