Articles Tagged with ''Industry 4.0''

You can’t accuse Volkswagen’s Dirk Voigt of having his head in the clouds—he’ll take it as a compliment. The head of digital production at VW, Voigt and a team of manufacturing and IT pros are developing an industrial cloud computing system to amalgamate production data from more than 120 factories. The objective: greater efficiency and lower costs.

Automotive OEMs love to show off their automated body-in-white assembly lines. Commercials invariably feature dozens of six-axis robots producing showers of sparks in choreographed routines. 

BMW has been at the forefront of Industry 4.0 for years. For example, the company was an early adopter of additive manufacturing, and today prints hundreds of thousands of production parts annually. 

Predicting the future isn’t what it used to be. It’s actually way better, and that’s great news for manufacturers.

Most manufacturers agree that digital transformation is necessary to remain competitive today and thrive tomorrow. Many large companies have already begun initiatives. But, when asked to quantify the impact of those initiatives on the bottom line, they often come up short.

Process improvement projects have traditionally struggled with obtaining accurate data quickly and easily. In many cases, various data sources provide competing sources of the truth. Smart technologies offer the means to provide a single source of the truth, without the time-consuming and labor-intensive efforts of the past.

All that glitters is not gold. Shakespeare's aphorism can apply to the latest manufacturing technologies as much as it does to gaudy false facades.