Industry 4.0 is also known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution or sometimes also referred to as The Industrial Internet of Things or IoT. The benefits of a connected supply chain are significant, not just in the reduction of production costs, but also in the return it brings to the entire value chain. 

In the last article in this series, we took a look at the state of readiness of the print industry. While it showed that, as an industry as a whole, we have a long way to go, the good news is that preparing and converting your business to Industry 4.0 ready is possible. What you need to do to prepare varies based on your current plant operations, and how you interact with your clients and process partners. If you recall the basic premise of Industry 4.0, it is a way to automatically facilitate the exchange of data between individual stakeholder processes throughout the supply chain as identified in the transformational workflow infrastructure diagram. Practically speaking, you need to capture, process, control, and communicate the data bidirectionally in order for it to work optimally. So, let’s take a look at what that means. If we look at the various processes in your plant, we can break them into three main components: hardware, software, and labor (as well as combinations of all). 

All production hardware used has controls, whether it is a press, finishing, converting, mailing, or other functional machine. In newer machines, the controls combine various states of electronics or electromechanics, while in older machines setups and controls are usually manual adjustments, except perhaps for the drive motors. “Electromechanics” refers to the integration of digital and physical systems, and electronics is more dedicated to manipulating electrons in a digital process. To better distinguish the difference, electromechanical will probably have knobs to set controls while electronic control is usually based on button and/or integrated preprogrammed logic.