Dahwood Ahmed, Regional Director of UK&I at Extreme Networks, examines the concept of Industry 4.0 and how smart factories will push manufacturing into this.
Manufacturing is entering Industry 4.0, giving rise to the world’s first smart factories. A golden rush of data now pours from previously offline machinery, offering an unprecedented overview and insight into the entire manufacturing process.
And that’s just the beginning. From digital twins to biometric screening and payment, intelligent energy and climate management, smart sensors, digital signage and 360 analytics for IT, Operations, and Marketing, the modern factory is becoming a marvellous technological beehive.
And the honey? Rich, actionable data. Digital tonnes of it.
However, all this data needs to be collected, analysed, and used in real-time. And when there’s that much traffic, it can easily overwhelm and crash a traditional network infrastructure.
In other words, one of the biggest problems in modern manufacturing isn’t building smart factories. It’s keeping them running safely at maximum capacity—and reaping the rewards.
A smarter world
As we all know, every industry on the planet has been forced to adjust over the last five years. Manufacturing was no exception to this abrupt disruption of the status quo. It was because of war, a pandemic, and economic headwinds and because several game-changing technologies matured or were invented, introducing next-generation tools in areas such as cloud technology, IoT, robotics, blockchain, AI, and more.
All these changes and challenges created unprecedented pressure to keep the world’s production and supply chain flowing.
Luckily, manufacturing is an experienced and mature industry used to handling significant changes. Its leaders are already embracing digital transformations and innovative technologies, making impactful strides towards increased productivity, production, and capacity without sacrificing resilience and safety.
Consequently, manufacturing machines and everything else connected to smart factories are coming online, providing manufacturers with something they have never had before.
A real-time digital overview of – and insight into – the entire manufacturing process.
Smart factory technology all comes down to data
So, by gathering and analysing data from sensors, machines, and other IoT devices, manufacturers gain real-time insights into their operations. They can measure and monitor equipment performance, identify potential problems before they occur, and automate manual processes.
In addition to data-driven decisions, there’s predictive analytics. By extracting actionable intelligence from new and existing data sources to predict future trends and behaviours, manufacturers can further improve machine maintenance, supply chain optimisation, the quality of goods produced, the customer experience, and safety procedures.
On the topic of safety, smart factory technology also provides significant benefits. Smart factory solutions can help prevent accidents and keep workers safe by monitoring the environment and equipment, identifying hazards, and alerting workers to dangers. In addition to safety, smart factory technology can help optimise energy usage, reducing costs and making it more sustainable.
Needless to say, these are massive changes that will have considerable effects on an operation’s efficiency and effectiveness. This is particularly significant for manufacturing because the industry is full of operations where even minuscule improvements can yield massive results.
Building skyscrapers on outdated foundations
However, all these new trains need tracks. Legacy network technology wasn’t built to handle the complexity or sheer amounts of data circulating in a smart factory. Nor does it have the other capabilities of modern networking, such as running digital twins.
Digital twins and simulation technologies are arguably some of the most transforming manufacturing tools to emerge from Industry 4.0. They revolutionise how manufacturers design, test, and optimise their operations by letting them create virtual models of their networks and processes. Using these models, they can simulate and test different scenarios without impacting production.
Yet this also requires a modern network infrastructure because of the incredible amounts of data passing between physical manufacturing processes and digital twin simulations. And the more processes come online, the more important it becomes to stay online.
Production line downtime, regardless of its cause, whether system overload, equipment malfunction, or connectivity loss, is costly. Between 2019-2020 and 2021-2022, the annual cost of downtime for Fortune 500 companies worldwide soared by 65% to more than £102 million.
And that’s per facility.
Staying secure
It’s not just network failure or equipment malfunctions, either. One of the few downsides of coming online is the exposure to bad actors, who are a relatively new threat to manufacturers. However, cybercrime is a threat that needs to be taken seriously.
From network disruption to halted production, lost data, compromised security, and reputational damage, cybercriminals seek to hold manufacturing operations hostage in any way they can, fully aware that a million-pound pay out could be cheaper than an idle operation.
Network hardening strengthens the defences of smart factories and can mitigate both passive (data is left intact) and active (data is corrupted or destroyed) forms of cybercrime. It provides industrial security and mitigates risk by providing a robust, secure network for a high density of connected devices, which brings us back to the heart of the matter.
The need for new infrastructure
Industry 4.0 is undoubtedly the next step in the evolution of manufacturing. Just like our brains process millions of nerve signals daily to transform our bodies into cohesive entities, smart factories can use technologies and the data they produce to create interconnected manufacturing marvels.
But the information must flow fast. If manufacturers want to reach their goals, if they want to build and run their smart new factories to the absolute pinnacle of their potential, they need to start at the beginning—with the foundation.
In other words, the network infrastructure.
