The New Phase of Industry 4.0

By CIOReview | Wednesday, June 5, 2019

FREMONT, CA: The evolution of the manufacturing sector has witnessed many phases. The first revolution introduced the world to steam-powered engines; the second introduced to the steel and electric factories, the third brought in automation technology and the fourth reformed interconnectivity and networking intelligence. With the fourth industrial renaissance since 1800, from steam-engines to artificial intelligence (AI), the principles and fundamentals of industries and the business organizations have transformed at a substantial degree. The conversion of mass-powered to autonomous robotics lead to the transformation of labor tasks into a digital role. The common misconception has misled the blue-collar workers into believing that the robots and AI applications are the potential contenders for substituting their business roles. The economists and industrialists determined data to be the building block of fourth industrial resurrection.  

The advancement accomplished by adopting digital technology has reached a point where the industry can experience another radical adjustment. In the technology-laced world, internet of thing (IoT) devices and machine learning platforms generate enormous data that need to be systematically controlled for effective management. Big data and analytics streamline, collect, and comprehend the scattered data to improve real-time decision-making capabilities.

Interaction of inter-tangled data from robots in a supply chain increases the productivity and elevates the efficiency of a workflow process. As the influx of data increases, day-by-day local storage becomes insufficient. However, with the introduction of cloud services and virtualization, unlimited data storage becomes possible to solve the age-old storage problem.

The range of capabilities possessed by a single autonomous robot reduces the cost of labor and further decreases the cost of production. The application of autonomous robots far exceeds the stages of production, as the mechanical synergy of an android with its neighboring droid creates an automated working environment and opens several new job opportunities for forthcoming employees.

Industry 4.0 often referred to as data revolution have not only provided business firms the ability to leverage real-time data for monitoring errors and deviations from the theoretical calculations but also improved the safety of workplace by administrating access control. The power of digitization has been the epicenter of the industrial revolution, and with the technological development still proceeding at a considerable speed, there is no slowing down of this revolutionary wave.

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