There is currently a lot of buzz about the Internet of Things (IoT) entering the manufacturing realm. Every buzz creates a lot of marketing efforts, seminars and products, and slight differences in terminology are designed as differentiators, to set the own product or insight apart from lesser insights or products. Industry 4.0, the 4 th Industrial revolution, the Industrial IoT, smart manufacturing, etc. all mean the same: Machines and material are connected to the internet, to broadcast immediate insight into their current state of affairs, demands, entitlements and well-being. Your machines and materials all of a sudden can act via the IoT like your teenagers via their cell phones. There are also business-to-business and business-to-consumer aspects of Industry 4.0 (it was invented in Germany, so let’s stick to the German shtick). I’ll focus here on manufacturing. Machines now can report cycles, unusual vibrations or temperatures in real time, materials can do the same. In a foundry, a slab can send an “I’m getting cold, it’s time to roll me”, or in a bakery a loaf can signal “I doubled, now bake me”. At a car manufacturer a transponder in a body can tell the workstation “I’m the car that gets the blue leather sports seat, not the regular blue leather one” – and the blue regular leather seat can complain if installed into the wrong car. With AX 7, it is possible to collect this information in real time, so the line or production manager can for example immediately see which production orders will be delayed if the machine with the unusual vibrations will be slowed down by 70% until the next scheduled maintenance, while the customer service already informed the customer that the planners scheduled the shortage to be covered by another plant. Sounds too good to be true? Not necessarily… If your ERP system runs on reliable data. There are companies that actually do have correct BOMs and routes, know their capacities and maintain their calendars and schedules. Maybe these are the companies in the high gloss flyers, with shop floors and machines as clean and shiny as the interior of my dishwasher at the end of the cycle. The reality for most companies that implement an ERP system though looks more like my own private workshop at home, or the interior of my dishwasher before I started it. Messy. There is no point in updating your plan in real time, when you can’t even calculate it correctly in the first place. Migrating your data and processes into an ERP system is a massive undertaking. Then actually using it for planning, not only as a glorified typewriter, is another big leap. Trying to change all the things that should have been fixed during the past years “now, while we are at it anyways”, or trying to tackle the next industrial revolution in parallel will not make things easier. ERP implementations fail for a reason, and more often than not, the reason is not the ERP system. By Jean Libre. The post Industry 4.0 / Smart Manufacturing appeared first on Arbela Tech .
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