October 2021
Becoming a Smart Manufacturing in 8 simple steps
Imagine being able to express the desire to transform your company into a factory of the future, in a smart manufacturing, with optimized production processes, where it is guaranteed the quality of products and the perfect functionality of production systems, autonomous and automated, monitored and under control.
In practice, a smart factory where everything works properly, where machines, humans and digital technologies create a complete and functional team that operates in unison.
An environment where production problems and product defects are eliminated, where efficiency is a fact, where potential problems will never take place, since everything is foreseen in time and resolved before it actually occurs.
How to become a Smart Manufacturing
The steps required to transform a normal industry in this kind of smart manufacturing, even if they require time and investments, will bring to the company returns beyond all expectations and will become of great help and improvement, in every industrial sector.
All the necessary steps start with an important premise, which is to understand the need for a transformation, useful for your company and due to keep up with the times and to enter the future of European industry.
A smart factory has to adopt smart machines, interacting to each other and with the totality of the surrounding environment, to be able to accelerate the transformation of productive processes. But, in order to manage the transition and make it working and useful, it is necessary to consider not only the machines and technological elements, but also the human side.
8 steps of a Smart Manufacturing transformation
Some of the most important and decisive steps are the ones listed below, starting with the mind-set switch and following with the practical technological changes. Those are necessary to create a new business strategy coherent with the company goals, with the market requests and the need to become flexible.
- Worker Training to enable every single worker, manager and employee, to improve skills, decision-making capacities and working abilities, to best contribute to the new organization system. Smart manufacturing doesn’t replace people but change roles and responsibilities by enhancing the potential of each individual that has to move towards a technological new fast-changing environment, where everything is connected and in constant evolution.
- Cloud Monitoring to storage all the information and data produced and exchanged among various technologies, robots, sensors, tools and machines.
- Internet of Things technology to help connectivity, among machines, to control and coordinate all the phases, schedules and processes involved, collecting and interpreting data, by humans and machines together, in order to make targeted and efficient decisions.
- Big Data Analysis to outcome with improvements and predictions strategies, in real time.
- Cybersecurity to guarantee security, privacy and protection of the data themselves.
- Robots to ensure accuracy in repeated activities throughout the line of production
- Digital twins, a real twin that gathers all the information of the original, processes and transforms them into optimizations, for the benefit of the production process, improving the quality of work processes and products themselves.
- Augmented reality to transform all the information, at once, into immediate actions of intervention and optimization.
Your Smart Manufacturing of the Industry 4.0 revolution
Knowing the concrete possibilities of the Industry 4.0 revolution, not only will give a precise and effective idea of the benefits of technology of the innovation to come, but will make it clear that the manufacturing world is moving forward, hand in hand with Artificial Intelligence, technology and digitization, and it will not stop.
The industries will have to keep up with new visions, new times and modernizations, in order to achieve agility, competitiveness, cost efficiency, higher profits and business volume return and to proudly carry on the economy of the European Community, towards the level of excellence, making it competitive with the rest of the world.