Cognitive manufacturing & Industry 4.0

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Manager for Business Development & ISVs, IBM SEE

Most manufacturing executives are considering Industry 4.0 or Industrial IoT as part of their strategies. Many interesting niche projects are already happening in order to solve different challenges in improving the quality of products, reducing yield, bettering the management of manufacturing process, enhancing and automating supply chains, and much more.

Originally coined in Germany through a technology project designed to computerize manufacturing, Industry 4.0 was launched into a worldwide initiative in order to transform the sector. Japan and China have even developed their own ‘Industrial Value Chain Initiative’ and ‘Made in China 2025’ to demonstrate their dedication to this strategy.

According the McKinsey Global Institute, Internet of Things (IoT) will potentially have a total economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion per year by 2025. (1)

It can be said that Industry 4.0 is more than just a catchy buzzword and it is more than just about increased connectivity. The focal point here is DATA collected by physical things.

IBM is a leader in transforming technologies with Industry 4.0, bringing together things that are instrumented, interconnected and intelligent in order to generate insights from collected data and transform the face of manufacturing.

Today, almost 90 percent of all IoT data never gets acted upon and data volumes will only grow larger. Conventional computing will continue to struggle to scale with the large influx of data and the complexity of the analytics. It therefore must become cognitive to process, analyze, and optimize the information.

Cognition introduced into the manufacturing environment can:

• Understand – access and analyze sensor data on premises or in the cloud, combined with other data sources
• Reason – identify hidden connections in huge amounts of data to self-diagnose issues
• Learn – draw on the resulting knowledge to continuously adapt/improve; this includes learning from products once they are sold and being used by consumers, creating a feedback loop back to product design and engineering

In short, cognitive manufacturing fully utilizes data across systems, equipment and processes to derive actionable insight across the entire value chain, ranging from design to manufacture. Having been built on the foundations of IoT, and by employing analytics combined with cognitive technology, cognitive manufacturing drives key productivity improvements in quality, efficiency and reliability of the manufacturing environment.

For example, IBM helped a US Electronics contract manufacturer enable a new level of supply chain optimization, with the following results:

• >90% decrease in the time required to investigate and solve supply chain issues
• 300% faster creation of sales quotes in response to customer requests
• 6x average increase in the time available for procurement representatives to identify cost-saving opportunities

In addition, take for example the agricultural equipment manufacturer John Deere, which is working with IBM to make sense of the flood of data generated by its tractor-manufacturing production line in Mannheim, Germany. Watson ingests, understands and learns from data captured by sensors embedded in the industrial equipment and from tractor parts that run along the production line, providing John Deere’s engineers with the data they need to optimize their operations and tailor orders for highly specialized agricultural machines.

The IoT market is exploding. In Southeast Europe alone, there will be 244 million connected devices and the entire IoT market in SEE will reach $3.18 billion by 2020, according to IDC data.

All this represents a chance for cognition to make its way into manufacturing.

For example, IBM’s Business Partners in Slovenia working with IBM Innovation Center in Ljubljana (https://ibm.co/2udrUMs) are using IBM technologies to build the Industry 4.0 solutions for SME manufacturing companies to help them make the journey into Industry 4.0 in fields where they can generate additional revenues or improve efficiency and reduce costs.

If you would like to understand how cognitive technologies can be made real for you and your customers, join me on 13 – 14 September 2017 at Hotel Ambasador in Opatija, Croatia, at the second IBM’s regional conference called Watson Summit 2017, where we can discuss further how best-in-class manufacturers have adopted IoT technologies to achieve greater efficiency.

1) McKinsey Global Institute (http://bit.ly/2sWQmlR)