Improving Resource Efficiency With The Help Of Industry 4.0
From the birth of industry the aim is to produce even larger quantities of products or services with less and less resources in terms of energy and materials. Industry 4. 0 goes through this direction ensuring process efficiency.
Up to 2020, companies surveyed expect an incredible quantitative and qualitative benefits from the planned investment. The study asked to companies interviewed which are their expectations about that in the future, they foresee an improvement in resource efficiency about 18 percent at the end of 2020 in each industry sector analyzed that can be translated in 3. 6% per year. Therefore, companies were accurate during the interview, saying that digitization will be the main pillar of the revolution and that they expect savings from dynamic and flexible production process, reduction of faults products and thus streamlining of the entire value chain. In practical terms, technologies permit transparency in processes in order to improve the utilization of machines and systems, for instance by optimizing lot sizes. Greater connectivity with all the components of the organization permit to structure and rationalize areas of work producing gains in productivity. The final aim is an intelligent use of data analysis for an integrated control purposes in order to reduce the rejection rate in production processes.
Finally, we can conclude that in average there will be from 2015 to 2020 an increase in efficiency equally to 17. 9% and a cost reduction nearly to 14%. During the survey, benefits are divided into cost reduction and increased efficiency. For the first one firms are positively optimistic, announcing that Smart Factories will lead savings over the normal effort of an amount equally to 2. 6%. Therefore, as I have disclosed cost savings do not derive only from the effort of a company alone, rather it comes from the cooperation and exchange of data and information among companies. In fact, annual cost savings of 2. 6% are possible only if each partner of the value chain do its part in reducing cost inside its company and if it collaborate with the interested parties. Thus, we can conclude that quantitative benefits are viewed as the milestone in order to start a glorious future characterized by sustainable competitiveness.
Firms present enormous expectation on qualitative benefits that Industry 4. 0 is able to give. The most important aspect is better planning and controlling in production process and all regard exchanges of data and material long the supply chain. In addition, they put focus on flexibility and higher customer satisfaction considered of main importance.
Planning and control can be viewed from two different points of view. The first one, focus on the integration of all partners long the entire value chain, while vertical integration as a starting point for more flexibility and a reduced lead to market. Vertical and horizontal optimization leads to a better product quality and customer satisfaction, because clients have products in faster time, with improved computational power and traceability of the root. However a lot of firms expect a medium or low improvement in terms of quality. This can be considered wrong because for instance companies of automotive and electronic industry sectors are moving their quality control at the beginning of the production process, their suppliers. They take all data upstream in order to take control of all the value chain reducing at the minimum faults or case of reduced quality. In this way companies take traceability of all through data storage, while through data processing raises the level of the manufacturing process, increasing productivity and consequently profitability.
