Industry 4.0 Boom Accelerated by Covid-19
Published on : Sunday 26-04-2020
With the Covid-19 pandemic is causing the global business ecosystem, digitalization across industries are taking shape at a striking pace. This open new opportunity for digital leaders to discover and implement innovative digital strategies to drive digital transformation across the organizational level. The coronavirus outbreak is speeding up the adoption of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), leading enterprises across industries into a more sophisticated state of the internet of things (IoT) technology and workflow.
Some industry experts believe that there are four central concepts to Industry 4.0. They are smart manufacturing, smart factory, dark factories, and industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology. These all reflect a greater trend of automation.
Since the entire world is gripped by the Covid-19 pandemic, the global supply chain is experiencing a level of disruption that has never been seen before. Some manufacturing companies have halted their production completely, while some have seen greatly reduced demand and others have seen a massive increase in demand.
The crisis is affected every manufacturer in some way and for many, this poses an existential threat.
Previously, Industry 4.0 was a greater interest of area to many manufacturers, and was a stimulating topic with huge potential advantages and widely regarded as an optimistic and future thinking area. But today, as the number of people diagnosed with the Coronavirus continues to exceed, the manufacturing sector has impacted more. The epidemic is upsetting the carefully calibrated logistics of global shipping and interrupted sailing has created a disparity in containers used to ship goods.
But to mitigate these challenges, enterprises are implementing Industry 4.0 technologies. Risk management is becoming an ever-more crucial part of the supply chain manager’s job. However, manufacturers who have not yet started or are in the early stages of transitioning to Industry 4.0 could grapple with problems. In this case, the adaptability to analyze and adjust inventory requirements, optimize their supply chains, and advance the OEE is now more of the essence.
In the Industry 4.0 pre-crisis environment, businesses were focused on getting a competitive advantage, cost reduction, productivity, sustainability, and innovation. But now for many manufacturers, the focus is survival essentially and beyond that, damage limitation.
On the other side, the average office space is no different than a typical industrial factory in many ways. Both involve on-site collaboration between employees to develop a specialized product to fulfill a certain need. In the past few years, it could be argued that offices were doing well in adopting digital workflows than factories. This means a section of these companies’ revenues are engaged in leasing costs, with some areas costing considerably more than others do.
The Covid-19 pandemic is triggering Industry 4.0, and who sees the uncertainty brought by the crisis an opportunity will drive further innovation. Moreover, we believe adopting more smart approaches within manufacturing processes could minimize the dependency on human workers, giving the chance to factories to reduce the size of a shift without downsizing production.