Industry 4.0 and the benefits it can potentially bring are often misconstrued to be a ‘Big-Bang' change in the way a company operates. Overnight, the automation of plant workflows and AI-driven business results are achieved to yield far-reaching and unprecedented benefits. This view of Industry 4.0 adoption has some serious flaws.
Forbes estimates the cost of downtime alone is over $50 billion each year for industrial manufacturers. This is more than substantial and can often be the difference between a company making or losing money. The article points toward predictive maintenance gaining prominence to significantly reduce downtime, to learn faster and predict failures long before stoppages can ever happen.
A common misconception when it comes to Digital Transformation and Industry 4.0 is that with the rapid adoption of the technology gamut associated with them, the manufacturing operation would, as a step change, transform into a fully automated endeavor, orchestrated almost entirely by autonomous AI applications, self-optimizing and self-driven.
Digitizing tasks and activities for frontline workers, while providing real-time operational visibility and driving process optimization and improvement, across all areas of business operations.
