As assembly plants become more digitally connected to both suppliers and customers, the potential threat posed by cyberattacks will only get worse. Cyberthreats to manufacturers are real, and the consequences can be devastating.

In today’s smart factories, cyber physical systems monitor physical processes, create a virtual representation of the physical world, and even make decisions. The traditional structure of the automation pyramid and the distinction between information and operations technologies are blurring.

Assembly technology is wonderful, but it is not perfect. In some way, each technological process has a downside.

If the factory of the future will run on data, new types of hardware will be needed to collect, route, process and display it. That means more than just new PLCs, but gateways, edge computers, tablets and other hardware.

To get an idea of the importance of sensors to the factory of the future, head to upstate New York to General Electric’s sprawling assembly plant in Schenectady, NY, where the company makes sodium-nickel batteries for cell-phone towers and other applications.

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. 

Like many long-established car manufacturers, the company that would become Škoda Auto started in the early 1890s by making bicycles. Today, you won’t see velocipedes rolling off of Škoda assembly lines, but you just might see plug-in electric vehicles.