| Wolfgang Blome issues two pleas: that Industry 4.0 be imple-mented in practice at plants and that businesses continue to think about drawing up new business models. |
Has Industry 4.0 already become a reality in industry?
Industry 4.0 describes a goal: the future of networked and digitized production. In reality, Industry 4.0 has not yet arrived to any great extent in manufacturing plants. We are still operating in separate worlds for automation and corporate IT. The driving forces behind Industry 4.0 are the Internet technologies that are now doing everything possible to migrate from the consumer world to the world of manufacturing. Current automation systems are closed and isolated; they are not based on open-source Internet technology. The same applies to existing IT systems. Industry 4.0 will be able to make a basic change in the course of the entire production chain if businesses merge the three technology worlds – corporate IT, consumer IT and embedded IT – into a single platform. |
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Bosch Rexroth has constructed an award-winning Industry 4.0 production line in homburg. doesn’t that mean it actually has been implemented in practice?
Yes, this is the first application to test and evaluate the advan-tages of Industry 4.0 in practice, and to demonstrate its economic benefits. After all, is there anyone today who really understands all the possibilities offered by all the facets of Industry 4.0? You can’t use it if you only talk about it. As with any new technology, users must learn about the opportunities offered by Industry 4.0 and discover its economic benefits in practical operations. But those who get started early will achieve a strong competitive advantage.
How great are the pressures from competitors – above all from an international angle?
The term Industry 4.0 is used to describe the digitization of production in Germany. Apple continues to be the best example of how new growth can be created with new technologies. This success story has showed us that physical products like the iPod and the iPhone were only able to evolve into billion-dollar businesses thanks to the iTunes software platform, the open app store and the Internet. This illustrates how great the growth potential of Internet technologies, cloud platforms and real-time communication can also be for the world of automation.
Industry 4.0 is a heterogeneous field of technologies deriving from production operations and the world of IT. What are the most pressing tasks for industry?
Let me use an example from automation technology. A control unit with engineering software is still being marketed as an individual product. It is a proprietary product that can be sold only once per machine. In practice, this means that the amount of revenue the seller makes depends on the number of controls it can sell. But for the buyer and user of the control, the crucial factor is not the 30 percent procurement cost but the 70 percent in operating expenditures incurred over the machine’s entire life cycle. If the product is monitored over its complets life span, the machine owner can be offered additional services products, such as those aimed at improving productivity. This is where the benefits of Industry 4.0 become apparent, since it offers new growth potential for suppliers of automation solutions. We need a standardized technology environment for this purpose. Nowadays, many people talk of the cloud as being a scalable data platform, yet a cloud-based program only makes sense if it can be used by a lot of people – joinly, simultaneously and at great data security. Businesses must open up to and live with the fact that they cannot be the only ones who have acess to the data. This means that a business model must integrate a structure for open Industry 4.0.
Does this also mean that they will have to open up their innovation processes?
That always depends on the viewpoint from which a company looks at Industry 4.0. If a supplier of automation technology wishes to develop a business model conforming to Industry 4.0, it must first embrace the mentality and motives of Internet technology. And it must work out which part of it can be utilized for factory automation. This is the only way to create the prerequisites for an open innovation process. Internet technologies are technologies that are universally valid and have their roots in the consumer world. They do not belong to a single company. Once companies have grasped this, a scalable cloud platform can then be developed as the basis for Industry 4.0 applications. |
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