THE RISE OF INDUSTRY 4.0

benefits for the business as a whole .

It is a perspective that aligns closely with the “ Industry 4.0 ” initiative , which contends that the fourth industrial revolution , already under way , is essentially about the integration of intelligent cyber-physical systems communicating between machines and humans in real time on the factory floor and , indeed , out in the real world . Beyond that , however , it is also about the wider connectivity of industrialised processes into the rest of the business .

This is important because integration is key in delivering visibility of work in progress and of what is happening on the shop floor . So , Industry 4.0 focuses on making manufacturing processes more agile and responsive to the needs of the business and the wider market .

In particular , it asks the key questions : how do you make improvements to the manufacturing process and accelerate time to market ; how do you manage product change more efficiently , and how do you monitor and assess the performance of finished products ?

Manufacturers across both discrete and process industries are still struggling to answer these questions . Information is often still captured on paper or in spreadsheets as part of laborious and error prone processes . There is little connectivity between systems that manage the

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