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When asked to picture a factory floor, many ordinary folks will conjure images of a large, enclosed industrial space buzzing with the noise of powerful machinery firmly tethered to the ground and overseen by skilled blue-collar workers ensuring that whatever manufacturing procedure underway proceeds in an orderly fashion, with any errors or glitches quickly spotted by human eyes and swiftly rectified.
Indeed, that’s the way it’s been for many decades, but something new is afoot. Something that’s starting to make that conventional imagery look decidedly antiquated – and even altering the design of manufactured products themselves. As an article in Forbes recently anatomized, manufacturing is undergoing a quiet but comprehensive revolution. Machine-executed automation is taking the place of what previously would have been termed skilled human labor to such an extent that product designs are being optimized for automated, rather than human, assembly.
Factory layouts are also undergoing a redesign. The assembly routines of automated machines differ from the assembly lines of human operators, meaning that the factory floor itself is undergoing radical reconfiguration. The new manufacturing processes can often dispense with many of the more conventional patterns of assembly, some of which (when executed manually) required different line speeds and storage space on the factory floor for partially completed inventory. Automation has allowed instead for a single, one-piece flow at a steady speed throughout the entire factory.
These are but two of the features characterizing what was dubbed by the Germany Federal Government back in 2011 as “Industry 4.0”, or the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in plainer language. If the first industrial revolution was enabled by the discovery of steam and water power, the second by the deployment of electrically powered mass-production assembly lines and the third by the rise of internet-disseminated digital information, then the fourth involves the power of its predecessors integrated with new artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics technologies to facilitate precision automation on an unprecedented scale.
Yet this preliminary description of Industry 4.0 is already too limited. Other, related technologies form part and parcel of it too, including the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), cloud computing, edge computing and the rise of “M2M” (Machine to Machine) communication and CPS (cyber-physical systems). What brings these technologies together into a single revolution is the end to which they are geared: all converge on the creation of efficient, accurate industrial automation. The collection and communication (between machines) of digital information is critical to the success of this project, which aims to fully integrate more scattered or separated systems into a much more streamlined process, held together and coordinated by both hardware and software.
And yet… what place do humans have in the automated world of Industry 4.0? Let’s turn to that question next.
Machine cleverness and human ingenuity in Industry 4.0
Despite enormous promise – freeing human time from soulless toil and releasing it for creativity and innovation, for example – the Fourth Industrial Revolution which is currently underway has its fair share of problems. Designed by what we might call intelligent technocrats, it must find its place in a human world and be seen to offer benefits to humans if it is to thrive.
The clever numerology favored by the German government to designate the previous industrial revolutions (as 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0) implies the march of progress, perhaps implicitly signaling that 4.0 will take us to a kind of blissful Shangri-La characterized by fully digitalized manufacturing. However, that goal, or fantasy, remains rather a long way off. The new technology is difficult to understand, requires major upskilling of the workforce, and is not yet capable of communicating properly with older, existing technologies.
This is not to suggest that it is therefore doomed, but it does suggest that uniquely human ingenuities are required to make it work for the good of all. Human agents will continue to be crucial to its prospective success, especially those with core management competencies that extend to embracing deep understanding of emerging technologies. These include Additive/3D/4D manufacturing processes, robust familiarity with artificial intelligence and machine learning, and firm knowledge of edge computing, IIOT and robotics systems.
One robust way to achieve this knowledge base is through the development of lucidly taught, pragmatic, next-generation lean manufacturing know-how. It’s to this issue that we’ll now turn.
Why lean manufacturing is the key to making Industry 4.0 work
Let’s begin with a brief overview of what lean manufacturing actually is, and then progress to a description of how it supports Industry 4.0:
What is lean manufacturing?
The essence of lean manufacturing can be summed up in four words: minimizing waste, maximizing productivity.
Let’s take a deeper dive into just what this entails.
Lean manufacturing, which as a philosophy long precedes Industry 4.0, nonetheless fits seamlessly with the latter’s core innovations, in that it too is aimed precisely at enhancing efficiency and cutting waste at each stage of the manufacturing journey.
Historically, the term “lean manufacturing”, or “lean production” as it’s sometimes called, will forever be linked with the name of the Japanese car-manufacturing colossus, Toyota. In fact, “Toyota” was its first moniker. When it was first crafted in the late 1940s by the auto-maker’s engineers, lean manufacturing was originally dubbed the “Toyota Production System”.
Similar to Industry 4.0 itself, lean manufacturing isn’t easy to define in precise terms, encompassing as it does a broad range of disciplines. It’s also been referred to as “Just in Time” Manufacturing, as well as making only “what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed”, according to Toyota, and “Jidoka” which loosely translates to “automation with a human touch”, and “Muda, Mura, Muri” meaning “Waste, Inconsistency, Overburden” – the manufacturing scourges it seeks to eradicate.
To this day, experts in lean manufacturing are sought by companies to help them eliminate nearly identical forms of waste to the ones identified by Toyota: the waste of overproduction, waiting/delays, lengthy transportation, processing, surplus inventory, unnecessary movement, defective products and, last but not least, underutilized human labor.
Lean manufacturing is, in effect, a continual learning process based on four “pillars of wisdom” as it were:
- Keep management decisions focused on long-term goals rather than on short-term tactics.
- Continually developing efficiency processes into production by balancing capacity with demand, standardizing repeatable tasks, and building a culture of “stopping the line” when errors arise so that they can be corrected before they start to pile up.
- Enhancing company value by investing in its people – by training them up whenever needed, encouraging their growth and treating them with respect by improving their working conditions wherever and whenever possible.
- Sustaining an organizational culture of constant learning by treating “mistakes” as learning opportunities – openly discussing and learning from how things went wrong and how that can be avoided.
These core principals are found in contemporary implementations of lean manufacturing, and inform the content of advanced higher education credentials in the discipline, such as the unique 100% online masters in lean manufacturing offered by Kettering University. Developed in collaboration with no less a symbol of successful lean production than General Motors, the Kettering masters equips its graduates to walk away from their postgraduate course with the coveted skills for improving quality output, streamlining cumbersome processes and paring down costly waste.
Toyota’s original concept has been added to in the West over the years, with, for example, new methods of quality control such as “Six Sigma” being added to it. This was developed around 1986 by Motorola’s Bill Smith, an engineer by training who became the company’s Vice President, although it “took off” in manufacturing 10 years later in 1996 after GE began deploying it.
“Six Sigma” refers to the six standard deviations or ‘sigmas’ on either side of the midpoint or “mean” of a bell curve depicting ideal distribution. For quality control purposes, the extreme ends of tolerance limits are six sigmas away from either side of the midpoint, where the vast majority of manufactured parts should ideally fall, and be without defect. Given the sheer scale of manufacturing in the real world, the Six Sigma approach understands that a perfect midpoint is rarely if ever an actual phenomenon and tends to shift over time. So, the mean isn’t always in the dead center of tolerance limits from the outset. As a result, the Six Sigma system allows for a “shift” in distribution of 1.5 standard deviations on either side of the ideal midpoint. Essentially, it measures the point at which quality suffers from overproduction and overextending output, identifying where (and by how much) processes need to be “tweaked” to restore acceptable quality limits.
Where does lean manufacturing “fit” with Industry 4.0?
While both focus on reducing waste and maximizing efficiency in production, bringing lean manufacturing into direct relationship with Industry 4.0 is seeding a new synergy between them. Lean manufacturing has proven so useful in large measure because of its versatility. Its data-driven methodologies can be applied to decision-making in any commercial domain, especially when it comes to tracking down the root causes of inefficiency which might otherwise have remained hidden.
Data, one quicky notices, is the common language, the shared currency, between Industry 4.0 and lean manufacturing methodologies. The latter is adapting to its intersection with Industry 4.0 by means of a newly emerging incarnation, which some are already dubbing “Digital Lean”.
Digital lean doesn’t amount to a set of new principles but rather to an enhancement of existing methodologies to make their implementation even more effective. In other words, digital lean uses Industry 4.0 and its technologies – especially the high-frequency data and superior data processing power the latter delivers – as new digital tools to deliver measurably more accurate, granular and timely information about all aspects of the manufacturing process.
Let’s take the example of waste reduction. Digital lean employs Industry 4.0 capabilities to accelerate the pinpointing and mitigation of waste by providing targeted, precise information to all who are charged with reducing it. However, this linkage goes even further, allowing for the identification of formerly invisible causes of waste, such as asymmetry of information and latency. Previously, these factors were notoriously difficult to detect even though, by the very fact of remaining unnoticed, they could exert a cumulative impact resulting in higher support costs, lower efficiency and reduced bottom lines.
To take the problem of overproduction as an example, prior to Industry 4.0, lean manufacturing could identify causes such as imbalances between demand and supply, which were often worsened by delays in demand signals and overly rigid process constraints. With Industry 4.0, digital lean can deliver real-time visibility across the entire value stream, allowing human interventions to recalibrate capacity and prevent wasteful accumulation of goods that are not actually required.
Worker movement provides another example. Lean manufacturing experts could identify inefficiently designed production lines and cells which resulted in the unnecessary movement of human operators. As these movements contribute no value to the product and delay the production process, lean could deliver redesigns to eliminate or reduce surplus worker movement. With Industry 4.0, digital lean can analyze performance data and improve design of layouts and equipment placement via virtual and augmented reality simulations to swiftly eliminate excess worker movement.
On the issue of data collection and analysis, prior to Industry 4.0, information tech (IT) and operational tech (OT) were relatively siloed. With industry 4.0 tech, digital lean can now integrate both, allowing previously unavailable overviews of plant and operations data to exist and be shared with plant and business users.
In conclusion: New generation manufacturing
Industry 4.0 is contributing powerfully to the primary goals of lean manufacturing, which are to nurture and design a leaner, more efficient and more profitable manufacturing industry. Thanks to the innovations of Industry 4.0, lean manufacturing – which has since its inception been driven by data – now has access to data extracted from operations in real-time. In turn, this new-generation data is enabling lean manufacturing experts to deliver improved, more accurate, and swifter decision-making throughout an entire manufacturing business, whether the managers in question oversee quality, maintenance or the plant as a whole.
The foundations are thereby being laid for a smarter, more connected and appreciably leaner manufacturing operation.
Also Read: How Advancement in Robotics Can Improve The Efficiency of Industrial Production Sector?
