Industry 4.0: what can be expected?

After the revolu­tion in mech­an­ic­al pro­duc­tion driv­en by the steam engine in 1765, fol­lowed by mass pro­duc­tion driv­en by elec­tri­city and oil a cen­tury later, and finally auto­mated pro­duc­tion sup­por­ted by elec­tron­ics and com­puter tech­no­lo­gies in the 1970s, it is the intro­duc­tion of new tech­no­lo­gies into factor­ies that is now driv­ing the emer­gence of the “industry 4.0″ concept. A fact­ory of the future, but one that did­n’t emerge out of thin air,” points out Thi­erry Rayna, a pro­fess­or at École Poly­tech­nique (IP Par­is), dir­ect­or of the Tech4Change chair. “Numer­ic­ally con­trolled machines date back to the 1980s, and exist­ing pro­duc­tion struc­tures have a force of iner­tia that should not be underestimated.”

Let’s face it, the factor­ies of the future are not going to replace ‘ordin­ary’ factor­ies with a wave of a magic wand. Nev­er­the­less, by mak­ing digit­al trans­form­a­tion a real­ity, they are bring­ing about real upheaval…

Fact­ory 4.0 can take sev­er­al forms: a “clas­sic” phys­ic­al loc­a­tion or a more dif­fuse net­work of pro­duc­tion and pro­cessing units based on digit­al tech­no­lo­gies. These tech­no­lo­gies enable machines, sys­tems, products, and people to be per­man­ently interconnected.

“This fourth indus­tri­al revolu­tion is dema­ter­i­al­ising the man­age­ment of pro­duc­tion, and in par­tic­u­lar enabling indi­vidu­als to become man­u­fac­tur­ers,” emphas­ises Thi­erry Rayna. A per­son can ima­gine an object, identi­fy a mar­ket, cre­ate a 3D prin­ted pro­to­type to test it, then find a ser­vice pro­vider to man­u­fac­ture it, and, with little or no invest­ment, put the product on sale online.

“So, evol­u­tion or revolu­tion? For every new digit­al tech­no­logy, there are always two waves,” says Thi­erry Rayna.  “The first is com­pan­ies doing the same thing as before but using these new tech­no­lo­gies. The second wave is driv­en by indi­vidu­als, entre­pren­eurs, who seize on these tech­no­lo­gies to invent rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent uses.” For example, the first ver­sion of the Web at the end of the 90s was noth­ing very ori­gin­al, just a way for man­u­fac­tur­ers to offer their cata­logues online rather than in prin­ted form.  “But when people took to the web to invent col­lab­or­at­ive encyc­lo­pae­di­as and social net­works, we could talk about a revolu­tion.”

“At Mich­elin, the imple­ment­a­tion of Engin­eer­ing 4.0 is already well advanced. Six years ago, we car­ried out an ini­tial review of exist­ing 4.0 tech­no­lo­gies and met with man­u­fac­tur­ers in Europe, the United States and Asia whose pro­duc­tion units were already oper­at­ing in 4.0 mode,” explains Nic­olas Jaunet, head of engin­eer­ing at the Mich­elin Group. “We found highly motiv­ated people whose jobs and day-to-day work had really been trans­formed and had become more attract­ive. What’s more, these indus­tries were doub­ling their annu­al per­form­ance com­pared with oth­ers in the same sec­tor who had­n’t yet taken the plunge.”

To imple­ment 4.0 tech­no­lo­gies, it was first neces­sary to phys­ic­ally con­nect machines to data stor­age areas, before using this data to gen­er­ate applic­a­tion cases to improve the com­pany’s per­form­ance. The first stage of the trans­form­a­tion involves the auto­ma­tion of pro­cesses, the use of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and col­lab­or­at­ive robots, and the use of autonom­ous vehicles to trans­port parts and mater­i­als with­in the fact­ory. In con­crete terms, this means that all the tyres that used to be checked manu­ally by oper­at­ors now come under the vis­ion radar of an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tem, free­ing up the oper­at­or’s time to focus on more qual­it­at­ive sorting.

The second aspect is the use of data. Oper­at­ors now have real-time access to data and to the per­form­ance of machines, work­shops, and plants. Based on this data, cer­tain AI sys­tems can be used, for example, to per­form pre­dict­ive main­ten­ance on cer­tain bak­ing presses, to anti­cip­ate break­downs or even guide people to identi­fy the ori­gin of a break­down on a machine. At Group level, the pro­duc­tion units of vari­ous plants have gen­er­ated applic­a­tion cases, enabling new pro­cesses to be tested in real time at ‘digit­al lead­er’ plants before being rolled out to oth­er Group sites. 70 applic­a­tion cases have already been deployed 8,000 times across all the Group’s plants.

“What effect will these devel­op­ments have on human work? Industry 4.0 will take time to roll out, which gives us plenty of time to sup­port our employ­ees as they change their jobs, or even take on new func­tions,” says Nic­olas Jaunet. “What’s more, if the hard work is done by the machine, the work­ing con­di­tions are more sat­is­fact­ory for the employ­ees.” The expert­ise of these oper­at­ors is set to evolve. For example, with the new elec­tric cars, we need to design high-tech mater­i­als (rub­ber) and tyres that can with­stand much heav­ier vehicles. Fact­ory 4.0 is thus becom­ing a real lever for trans­form­ing the tyre industry.

For his part, Thi­erry Rayna believes that the more we digit­ise, the more valu­able human labour becomes, for­cing staff to con­cen­trate on import­ant tasks. On the oth­er hand, care must be taken not to lose expert­ise when work is entrus­ted to robots. “For example, in the field of weld­ing, while the man­u­fac­ture of the first parts requires real expert­ise, the pro­duc­tion of the 1,000 or 10,000 oth­ers that fol­low can become truly tedi­ous and bor­ing. But how can we entrust this task to robots without the mas­ter weld­er los­ing his skills? That’s the chal­lenge posed by these new technologies… “

Marina Julienne