Industry 4.0: A Quick Brief on Benefits and Challenges

Industry 4.0 indicates the start of a new industrial revolution to enhance communication, analysis, and utilization of the resources in the manufacturing companies by bringing together two powerful components: advanced techniques of manufacturing and internet of things.

Also referred as the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0 is the digitization of industrial marketing keeping the smart manufacturing operations at the forefront. Though the term Industry 4.0 was introduced in the context of manufacturing initially, it has now covered every industry thanks to technological advancement. It is considered as a leap in quality management system driven by IoT.

Industry 4.0 comprises advanced analytics, Robotics & Automation, Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, and Process Digitization across the business supply and value chain.

Why Embrace Industry 4.0?

Embrace Industry 4.0 for the following reasons:

• Advanced Analytics will enable companies to have improved quality and capacity of their production process. Analytics will also help to prevent nonconformance with better predictions based on the data trends in the company.
• Introduction of Robotics & Automation will help companies to reduce the production time, thereby reducing the time to market and the wasted resources.
• Process Digitization makes the user experience better – be it for customers or employees. Also, digitization helps in reducing expenses and contribute long-term benefits to the organization.
• IoT and Artificial Intelligence can bring all the supply chain processes closer, reducing the end-to-end digital supply chain time.

If every company will start embracing the Industry 4.0 for their regular functions like manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, or procurement, they will experience a noticeable profits growth with minimal expenditure.

Related Article : Will Industry 4.0 Streamline the Chemical Industry Operations

What Are the Challenges That Emerged with Fourth Industrial Revolution?

With the evolving trend of Industry 4.0, businesses are experiencing a change with the way they work and interact with others. It has also led to the rise of new challenges that business owners may face:

Defining New Business models

Whether your business follows a service-oriented approach, a network-oriented approach, or a user-driven approach, defining a new strategy is a tough job. As it depends on many factors including Standardization, Work organization, Availability of products, Changing Technologies, Know-how protections, Availability of skilled workers, Research investment, Professional development, and Legal Frameworks. Hence, you need to perform a complete analysis and figure out ways through which you can align your existing business models with the new-era technological evolution Industry 4.0.

Change in Organizational Behavior

There is a dire need for rethinking your organization and its processes for productive results. The era of digitization may provide organizations a support with automated tools that can add flexibility to the work environment, allowing employees to have a better work-life experience. However, Industry 4.0 is a bigger challenge for HRM wherein it acts as a changing agent. The implementation of new technologies is bound to bring a lot of changes in the organizational behavior, improving the productivity and efficiency of the workforce with centralized and collaborated platforms to interact and work.

Understanding your Business Case

The introduction of the digitization is the introduction of the competitive challenges as well. Transitioning from a product-based traditional approach to the service-based approach implies a significant change in entire process life-cycle. Also, the data flow will increase. Gone is the time when the product crossed the factory gates and no longer remembered by the manufactures. The service-based approach requires complete attention till the product reaches customers and the customer is satisfied with the quality delivered. This is often a reason that understanding the business case with technologically advanced systems turns out to be a challenge.

Related Article : Is Your Manufacturing Company All Set for Industry 5.0

Conducting Successful Pilots

Conducting successful pilots with Industry 4.0 requires an advanced quality management solution that you can integrate with your existing quality processes to ensure every issue is resolved effectively and eliminate the reoccurrence. Unlike traditional practices of resolving quality issues, you must be more specific about the issues you want to target. The efficient management of any issue requires you to identify the actual root-cause that needs to be resolved by defining the right action plans accordingly.

These are just a few challenges to discuss. However, identifying action(s) requirements, encouraging change management, examining company’s growth culture, bringing departments in collaboration, fulfilling recruitments and training requirements, cannot be ignored as challenges with Industry 4.0.

The best solution to overcome/ prevent these challenges is implementing a quality management system suite that can help you manage all your quality processes and issues while complying with the requirements of the digital era. One of the highly recommended systems is Qualityze eQMS.

A powerful quality management system not only helps you overcome the challenges of Industry 4.0, but it also helps your organization to leverage the additional benefits that this technological upgrade promises. Some of the additional benefits of the fourth industrial revolution are:

• Improved productivity through resource optimization and automation.
• Real-time data insights for real-time supply chains and economy management.
• Increased possibilities of continual improvement due to technology-driven monitoring and maintenance process.
• Real-time check on processes for improved product quality. IoT enabled improvement.
• Improved work environments and higher-level of sustainability.
• Personalized communication will help gain trust and loyalty from the customers.

Start realizing these powerful benefits for your organization by taking immediate action to adopt Industry 4.0 even it requires you to implement a new advanced quality management system.

Consider a cloud-based eQMS system as they are known for their security, scalability, flexibility and reliability. Cloud systems are easily implemented, maintained and can keep you current with the ever-changing compliance requirements and growing customer quality expectations.

Qualityze is an innovation leader in cloud-based quality management system.  Request your demonstration today and get a 7-days free trial before making your final decision. You will get to experience Qualityze eQMS difference and how it can enable your organization for Industry 4.0   quality management.

It’s a known fact that Industry 4.0 has its challenges, but every challenge you overcome is a open door to new opportunities and rewards!

Be a leader and contact the Qualityze Team Today!