EDITOR’S CHOICE
INDUSTRY 4.0 BENEFITS:
HOW MANUFACTURERS CAN OVERCOME
COMMON CHALLENGES AND PUT DATA TO USE By Evan Sloss, Director of EMEA at iBASEt
a steady flow of manufacturing data. These devices are the modern day ‘bricks and mortar’ for a smart factory, and the data they generate can help organisations transform their day-to-day operations. The data can help with everything from quality improvements, reducing energy usage, and enhancing process performance. There is a problem, however: iBASEt’s recent
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research revealed this data is going to waste. More than half of discrete manufacturers are not effectively harnessing Industry 4.0 data, while two fifths of them are not using this data at all. This means manufacturers are not fully
realising the benefits from the investments they have made. So exactly what is going wrong? Specifically, there are two main challenges that are preventing manufacturers from getting on top of their data and putting it to use:
1. SILOED DATA
One of the biggest reasons for manufacturing data going to waste is that it often exists in siloes. As such, the current state of play within many manufacturers could be compared to the parable of “the blind men and the elephant”. In the story, six blind men each inspect an elephant from a different perspective, coming to different conclusions as to what the animal must be. One
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s manufacturers rush to digitally transform and embrace Industry 4.0, there is an increasing number of IIoT-enabled devices on the factory floor, generating
feels the trunk and believes it is a snake, while another touches a tusk and believes it is a spear. There is a similar problem within
manufacturing. If data only gives part of the picture to different people within the business, it can be hard for them to
identify a specific problem or evaluate a situation. This leaves a vast amount of data elsewhere in the organisation going to waste. If data is only viewed through the lens of a specific individual or department, it can be difficult to avoid bias – and then it will not have a positive impact.
2. CONFLICTS LEADING TO PARALYSIS
Even if data siloes are broken down, there is a risk that manufacturers can become overwhelmed with too much data. These days, one single car can generate up to 25 gigabytes of data every hour – so imagine how many data points manufacturing plant could produce. Trying to evaluate and come to terms with all this data when making important decisions can easily lead to decision paralysis, with data offering conflicting guidance. This decision paralysis has proved a huge
barrier to creating autonomous vehicles – if they are unable to process information quickly enough, they sometimes end up making no decision at all. Many of us will have experienced similar problems in meetings, with time eaten up by arguing whose data is correct, rather than drilling into what the data is telling us.
A UNITED FRONT There is a simple solution to these two big problems: manufacturers need to ensure all team members and departments are able to look at the same data, and are given access to the same tools to analyse it. This is the only way to agree exactly what the most pressing problems are, and how to address them. The volume of manufacturing data is only
going to increase in the years to come, so this issue will continue to grow in importance. This is why manufacturers’ approach to data needs to be standardised and available to the relevant person in the correct context. By defining a manufacturing data architecture – as part of an operations management platform – manufacturers can capture the most useful value from the ever-escalating amount of data that is going to be stored in manufacturing systems. Manufacturers need to get a single source of truth for their data, then give employees across the organisation access to the tools they need to analyse and make sense of it. Then they can move forward confident in their ability to put data to use. This will enable them to make the most of the investments they have made in Industry 4.0, and set the organisation on course to make increasingly intelligent data-driven decisions.
iBASEt
www.ibaset.com
Autumn 2022 UKManufacturing
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