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How to Participate in Industry 4.0—Part 2: Internal Hardware Systems

In this new series we look at Industry 4.0—not as a marketing term, but in an actionable way so that you can begin or continue to prepare your company and participate in the many benefits. In this second article in the series, we take a look at internal hardware systems.

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About David Zwang

David Zwang travels around the globe helping companies increase their productivity, margins and market reach. He specializes in production optimization, strategic business planning, market analysis, and related services to companies in the vertical media communications market. Clients have included printers, manufacturers, retailers, publishers, premedia and US Government agencies. He can be reached at [email protected].

Discussion

By Robert Godwin on Apr 27, 2021

David,

Good article. As an example of what IOT can do, look at Scissor Hands guillotine cutter software, a cloud based system that only requires a circuit board change to be installed. This proves your point regarding older machines that, when upgraded, have added machine intelligence companioned with sophisticated data collection. Now all that needs to be done is to get PSPs to actually use their brain (MIS system) to open the window on what is porfitab le, and what needs to improve or be totally changed. Good luck with that.

 

By David Triulzi on Apr 27, 2021

Good day to you all. My name is David, I'm a new memeber from Italy of this community and I'd like to offer my contribution since my business, is to explain to printing entrepreneurs the large impact of Industry 4.0 Program and what the real benefit for a printing company can be, when adopting these protocols.

David Zwang and I have discuss a bit about these aspects in the past months and, when I saw his article I could not avoid to subscribe. Let me limit my approach today to one single aspect, a concrete example of positive consequence of adopting a MIS-machine-MIS approach. The discovery of what we call "unproductive times". Meaning, uncover all the reasons a machine is not as efficient as expected. This, very probably is having to do with bottlenecks and inefficiencies of the entire production and communication processes, in the company. How do you know for instance, if that machine is down due to a waiting time, responible of which is plates remaking, or any other reason not strictly dependant by the machine itself? How many times is that happening in a day/week/month. What's the impact on the other department, etc.. Proven technologies are available today to get all machines under control, despite to brand, model, age. Direct connection to any MIS, with or without JDF involvement is soemthing we do since 2009 here.

If anyone is interested to discuss about other relevant aspects connected with Industry 4.0 technology, I'll gladly be available to supply more hints. As a last notice, in Italy the government is actively promoting this new industrial revolution, by providing important financial help to those who buys machines and software under a Industry 4.0 project.

 

By Eric Vessels on Apr 28, 2021

@DavidT, thanks for being a member of WhatTheyThink and for this contribution!