EDITOR’S CHOICE
THE NEXT STEP IN MANUFACTURING
By Nicola O’Byrne and Martin Cotter, Analog Devices
latest industrial revolution driven by artificial intelligence and massive connectivity. In this new age, data generated by sensors and digital systems allow businesses to monitor processes taking place in the physical world, laying the foundation for more flexible modes of production - an approach increasingly required by changing consumer demands.
T But consumer demand is just the tip of the
iceberg when it comes to the current emphasis on Industry 4.0. With economic, geopolitical, environmental, and population issues and crises rippling across the globe, industrial labour supply and supply chains are being impacted like never before. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, is shining a light on this need for advanced technology, real-time data, and flexible manufacturing and supply chains.
With increased automation and robots taking on repetitive, dangerous work, manufacturers can augment human labour and ensure continuity of production. This frees up workers to leverage their cognitive brain power and enables re-shoring of previously off-shored automated and repetitive work. “There are more and more capabilities people are discussing, like the use of IoT, robots and augmented reality in manufacturing settings,” says Kaibo Liu, associate director of the IoT Systems Research Center and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “You’ll start to see higher and higher resolution data gathered from the manufacturing process, making more aspects of decision-making possible in real time.” More localised supply chains can also add new flexibility to manufacturing, with the added benefit of reduced environmental impact from lower transportation complexity. Finally, with reliable and real-time data and easily reconfigurable systems, manufacturers can make decisions quickly such as scheduling maintenance, adjust a machine setting, or pivot from making shirts to face masks. While some elements of the next industrial
revolution remain aspirational - like fleets of autonomous robots cooperating on advanced tasks like construction, recovery and rescue, others are already being realised. One example
10 LOST PRODUCTION LOST CAPACITY
here is decentralised 3D printing facilities, which are reducing time to market and time to customer for advanced manufacturing. With the right partners, today’s businesses can access many of the gains in efficiency, safety and productivity promised by Industry 4.0 manufacturing - and set the stage for the transformative next step in manufacturing.
THE 4TH REVOLUTION The 3rd Industrial revolution brought us electronics, computing, telecommunications and digital technologies. This allowed manufacturers to design plants to mass produce a small number of products, or even a single product, at high volume. Today, a greater level of flexibility is required as consumers expect more options and levels of customisation than what was available in the 1920s - or the early 2000s, for that matter. “If you want to buy a car, there are many options you can choose from,” says Kevin Carlin, vice president of condition-based monitoring Otosense AI at Analog Devices. “Manufacturers need to be able to cater to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of different configurations. Then they need to manage the entire plant and supply chain to be able to
operate to respond this new type of demand, including more localised manufacturing facilities and by designing production lines that can be
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COST OF LABOUR PER UNIT
COST OF HOLDING INVENTORY
respond to that in real time, and configure their factories to move from one model to another.” Making the leap is no simple matter. Most
factories rely on an existing, sometimes dated, technology ecosystem. Simply replacing old equipment with new equipment is expensive and often unrealistic. It is one reason why the road to Industry 4.0 manufacturing may be a matter of augmentation rather than replacement, bringing the intelligence enabled by modern-day IT down to the machines already on the factory floor. By setting up a wireless, sensor-driven
communication network at the production level, partners like Analog Devices help manufacturers realise the promise of emerging technologies such as condition-based monitoring. Here, the health of a specific machine or part can be monitored by sensors, allowing plants to identify, diagnose and solve abnormalities before they become an issue or possibly even fail outright. This real-time monitoring can help extend equipment lifespans and increase throughput. Given that unscheduled downtime can amount to nearly a quarter of total manufacturing costs, predictive maintenance has the potential to unlock significant savings and productivity.
Manufacturers are forced to change how they
quickly reconfigured for different batch sizes. - Nicola O’Byrne, ADI strategic marketing manager for Connected Motion and Robotics, Analog Devices
’’ Autumn 2022 UKManufacturing
oday, the most precious resource in the manufacturing industry is not steel, coal or electricity, it is data. Companies are beginning their journey of Industry 4.0 manufacturing, the
23.9%
PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL MANUFACTURING COSTS CAUSED BY DOWNTIME
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