Orientation for Industry 4.0 implementations

New information and communication technologies are increasingly becoming part of everyday industrial life. But while large companies are already successfully helping to shape the digital transformation, SMEs in particular often lack orientation for the digitization of their value chains. Industry 4.0 applications offer German SMEs in particular the advantage of being able to position themselves internationally as pioneers of innovative solutions.

Communicating recipes for success in digital transformation

The results of the international short study "Industrie 4.0 konkret", which was conducted by the Fraunhofer Institutes for Industrial Engineering IAO and for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA and published by the Industry 4.0 Alliance Baden-Württemberg, show how the topic of Industry 4.0 is perceived in a global comparison and what successful project management looks like in concrete terms. The aim of the study is to make recipes for success in the digital transformation usable for industrial companies so that they can use concrete implementation examples to guide their own Industrie 4.0 applications.

International differences in the application of Industry 4.0

As part of the study, 17 companies from nine countries, including Japan, Taiwan and the USA, were surveyed about their experiences with the implementation of Industrie 4.0 applications in the period from May to December 2021. An international comparison shows that the German-speaking companies surveyed tend to use people-centric technologies, while technology-centric solutions predominate in Asia, Oceania and the USA. There are also clear differences in project organization. Foreign companies in particular rely on special Industry 4.0 project teams.

Topic map shows application potential for Industry 4.0

Based on the company survey, successful use cases for Industry 4.0 implementations were then identified and mapped in a topic map with eight thematic categories such as AI in production, digital assistance or networked production systems. Simon Schumacher, head of the study at Fraunhofer IPA, says of the topic map: "With the topic map, we were able to transfer a framework designed in the Future Work Lab into practice and immediately test its suitability in this study. The topic map offers companies the opportunity to orient themselves to the thematic categories with their own use cases and to initiate a coordinated development." In order to reflect the versatile and, above all, different approaches and implementation possibilities of the countries surveyed, the study also presents some recipes for success on international projects of different sizes and with broadly based technology applications. Based on the identified Industrie 4.0 use cases, the topic map and the implementation examples of international industrial companies, the short study also derives very specific recommendations for the successful introduction of Industrie 4.0 and provides further guidance for the digital transformation of companies (mainly from Baden-Württemberg; the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation is based in Stuttgart). Source: Fraunhofer IPA

This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/orientierung-fuer-industrie-4-0-umsetzungen/