The benefits of a connected supply chain are significant, not just in the reduction of production costs, but also in the return it can bring to the entire value chain. The terms used to describe this are Industry 4.0, also known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution or The Industrial Internet of Things (IoT). 

In the first article in this series, we took a look at “the state of readiness of the print industry,”  to participate in this new way of doing business. Then we started to break down the various processes in your plant into three main components: hardware, software, and labor (as well as combinations of all). The second article looked at what you need to do to prepare to capture process, control and communicate the data bidirectionally in hardware systems in order for a successful implementation. To review, ideally the hardware system management needs to be automated (more on that in the next article) to get the maximum value.

However, even with limited hardware support, automated software solutions can still offer significant benefits. Looking at the roles of software in Industry 4.0 is a fairly daunting task; after all, software is ubiquitous. It is used to manage internal and external processes, hardware systems, facilitate manual tasks, and the list goes on. That being the case, how can we look at the roles software plays in an Industry 4.0 scenario? To keep it focused, I decided to break down the various types of software in like groupings. In this article we will look at content production software’s role in Industry 4.0.