Digital Transformation And Industry 4.0 In Manufacturing

David Hermann, ANZ Electrical, Instrumentation and Process Automation Manager, Goodman Fielder

There is a lot of focus at the  moment around Digital  Transformation and how this  relates to the manufacturing  industry. Terms like Industry4.0  and the Industrial Internet of Things are  thrown around and seem to pop up in the  most unlikely places as if they are being used  more for marketing purposes than driving  efficient manufacturing. So, what’s it all  about? 

Digital Transformation is not about  placing robots throughout your production  line or using a new piece of software to display  your site KPIs. It is simply the fundamental  change in thinking to use real time data as  the basis to make all business decisions on,  and where suitable, for these decisions to be  made in an automated fashion with limited manual input. It frees up  your most valuable resource, your people, giving them more time  to do the things they do best. Instead of manually entering data  or using paper forms to record information, your people use their  individual skills to increase production output and reduce waste.  They are happier and more motivated in their workplace. 

Industry4.0 is the philosophy that enables Digital Transformation  to occur. The concept of Industry4.0 is that all areas of the business  that create and use data are interconnected into a single ecosystem.  No more silos of information that other systems in your business rely  on for decision making left stranded and alone with manual labour  being the only means to relay this data from one point to another.  Whereas Industry3.0 implemented automated machines to reduce  the manual labour in manufacturing products, Industry4.0 connects  these machines together so that they can share information. 

There are a number of ways to bring this about, some not as  efficient as others. The Automation Stack was traditionally used to  connect systems. In the Automation Stack production plant floor  equipment like PLCs and HMIs share data with the supervisory  SCADA, in turn sharing data with the Manufacturing Execution  system, and then to the business ERP.  The problem here is that there are many  connections to support, especially when you  start adding further programs like a Quality  Sampling system, Preventative Maintenance  system or OEE manager. Each new program  needs data from many different sources so  you end up with a spider web of connection  paths between all the applications that create  or use your data where everything is trying  to communicate with everything else. 

“Connecting all areas of the business that create and use data into a single ecosystem is the philosophy of Industry4.0. Creating this single, interconnected ecosystem will allow all manufacturing equipment, programs and business systems to share information and to access the real-time value of data enabling Digital Transformation. This will lead to increased productivity and efficiency in the manufacturing process with less waste as business decisions will be made using the latest, real-time information”

The more efficient way to connect  disparate systems is to have all sources of  data send their data to a central authority.  Any program that uses data retrieves it  from this central authority. Some like to  call this a Single Source of Truth or Unified  Namespace or the Hub and Spoke model.  Whatever you want to call it this central data authority is where  you go if you have information that others need, or if you want to  retrieve real time data. It is not a data lake that holds historical data,  but if you do happen to have a data historian it would be archiving  data from this central data authority. The choice of infrastructure to  implement this comes down to personal preference. OPC UA and  MQTT are the most common approaches with OPC using a server/  client method while MQTT uses publish/subscribe. My preference  being MQTT due the lower bandwidth required and the advantages  of publish/subscribe over server/client models. This also makes  MQTT much better suited for connecting IIoT devices to the central  data authority. 

Creating a defined location to publish and subscribe to real  time data will allow you to implement the principles of Industry4.0.  Allowing all the manufacturing equipment and programs and  business systems to share information and to access the real time  value of data enables Digital Transformation. This will lead to  increased productivity and efficiency in the manufacturing process  with less waste as business decisions will be made using the latest,  real time information.