BrainBlog for ServiceNow by Charles Araujo
Industry 4.0 was supposed to be a revolution.
It has certainly delivered on its promise to a degree with manufacturers and distributors capturing data, leveraging analytics, and implementing automation.
But a revolution?
While deploying technology in these ways is essential and foundational, industry leaders are learning that they must couple that tech-centric innovation with equal amounts of innovation in how they integrate their operational technology (OT) into the end-to-end business processes of the organization, and how they deliver the right information to the right people at the right time to enable the right decisions.
Process is the Key to Realizing Transformational Value from Industry 4.0
At a business level, there has always been a close coupling of factory or warehouse operations and both the front and back offices.
But the integration of OT and the information technologies (IT) that run them has always been challenging. So, most organizations have focused on easy wins and left the more complex integrations — and, therefore, big transformational opportunities — for another day.
The problem is that this approach has often created the illusion of transformation. “Massive amounts of data in today’s modern manufacturing facility flow fast, and through a dashboard can look like a single cohesive unit,” says Elhay Farkash, CEO of Zira. “You know this isn’t the case…Data from sensors needs to be moved to a different system to be analyzed, with results usually requiring a manual review before they are fed back into a different system.”
To fully realize its promise, the Industry 4.0 movement must not only achieve true integration on the floor, but must also break free of it to seamlessly integrate with end-to-end business processes.
“The most visionary supply chain and manufacturing leaders are realizing that Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing technologies…are a secret weapon they can use to drive cultural change,” explains Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, writing in Forbes. “These leaders are breaking the mold, empowering their employees, and driving results that are saving their companies tens of millions of dollars or more each year.”
But the opposite is also true. When organizations fail to connect their Industry 4.0 efforts with their end-to-end business processes, it is those disconnects that are often the root cause of issues that lead to a failed customer experience and margin loss.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
