Just like we already made an advance on this article about the 4.0 industry, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is already here and it has come to stay. The increase of digital factories or smart ones with automated processes and controlled by robots is unstoppable. The presence and human supervision is reduced on the factories, that’s why we can talk about a new industrial revolution.
The first 100% digital factory
In July 2015 the city of Dongguan was born, in China, the first factory without human workers. That is to say, the first digital factory operated by computer controlled robots. Where before worked around 650 people, now 60 workers control all of the production process from a centric control system. It’s prevised that in the next two years, the number of robots increases in a 1000%. This means that the 80% of the automatic processes of production would be controlled by machines.
In the pursue of efficiency, the improvement in productivity and with the objective of always achieving better results, the digital or intelligent factory, has come to stay. This example is an extreme case. In the majority of the cases the reality is that the objective of the digital factory is not to eliminate the worker. Getting an integrated planning and bettering the control of the production processes, are the two primordial objectives. For that, it’s fundamental to comprehend every phase of the chains of production and modernize them in a virtual environment that permits us simulate and visualize all of the process. It allows us to simulate and visualize all of the process. It’s not only about implementing a software that adapts to the necessities of our enterprise and that helps to achieve the objectives of the production. It’s about trying to analyze the processes, systematize them and digitalize them. By this we mean that the goal of this new industrial era is to create a virtual environment of work where the times and costs of the production. Achieving better results to adapt in a market that’s more competitive and changing every day.
This is not less than a change of paradigm in the industry: in the real world of manufacturing it’s converging with the world of the digital manufacturing so the organizations can plan and project all of the cycle of life of the products and installations of the digital production.
The keys to a digital factory
Although based in our experience in many factories, we believe that the human supervision will continue to be necessary in great part to the factories, little by little the future secrets of the factories are being pinpointed. Which are the keys to a digital factory?
- Flexibility and adaptability. The new digital factories must be easy to set up. It’s to expensive to create a new software, because of this we must achieve to redesign some process of the software production that manages will be able to reconfigure easily and adapt to the new necessities.
- Simulation capacity. If we want our digital factory to be efficient, it must be capable, at a medium term, of simulating situations, and once that it overcomes that phase, foresee situations, and once we overcome this phase and possible failures during the process, that let us anticipate and act before they happen.
- Capacity of auto diagnosis and solution of problems. The ideal is that the new software that integrate the digital factory being capable of detecting, diagnosing and solving their own problems without human supervision. It has been demonstrated that when you have a problem in the process of production, the human intervention always results ineffective and slow. For that, our digital factory must count with good sensors, a software of a potent diagnostic, networks of fast communication that are efficient and flexible interfaces, among others.
The challenge
If the goal is the optimization of resources on every level (human and material), we must go a step further. And people are starting to talk about the industrial digitalization in the cloud. Installing software on different levels is expensive. In this case, the innovation it’s presented as our best ally. A system that can control everyone. The risks are reduced, the benefits enhanced. The key Word is: system interconnection. Without a doubt, a real challenge for the new era of this industrial revolution already in track.
