Industry 4.0: what is it?
According to an ACATECH (the German National Academy of Science and Engineering) Study the term “Industry 4.0” refers to the “widespread integration of information and communication technology in industrial manufacturing”.
Even if “advanced technologies do make it possible to access a much wider range of data, the ability to leverage the underlying potential of this data is just as dependent on a company’s organisational structure and culture.”
“The ultimate goal is to become a learning, agile company capable of continuous, agile adaptation to a changing environment.”
The ACATECH Industry Maturity Index
The ACATECH Industry 4.0 Maturity Index guides companies throughout the implementation of this transformation. It consists of six stages, and they are:
- Computerization: different ICT solutions are used within the company in isolation.
- Connectivity: the various and isolated ICT solutions get transformed into integrated components of an overall system.
- Visibility: the achieved integration provides access to data that before was unavailable (and unused).
- Transparency: the company starts to get an understanding of the changes in the sensed data and their dynamics.
- Predictive Capacity: the company is not only able to understand the sensed data but also to predict their evolution and variation.
- Adaptability: prediction capability allows the company to adapt to changes in the surrounding environment/conditions.
Spazio IT Approach (one step at a time)
Spazio IT can provide support to companies in all stages of the Industry 4.0 Maturity Index.
Of course, first things first: many companies are still struggling to get from stage one (different and isolated ICT solutions) to stage two (integrated components).
Spazio IT offers to implement this integration not by replacing all previous existing solutions with a new “super-duper”, omni-comprehensive solution, integrating almost everything. On the contrary Spazio IT proposes a “one step at a time” strategy where already existing ICT solutions are connected with each others via a specially designed communication/integration infrastructure.
This approach allows the company to leverage the ICT solutions available in house till their usage is economic and makes sense.
The communication/integration infrastructure developed by Spazio IT, though allowing the integration of legacy ICT solutions, is based on well known and widespread standards, e.g. OPC-UA, SQL, GIS, and so on. This allows Spazio IT solution to easily interoperate with all modern and currently available Industry 4.0 technologies.
On top of that, Spazio IT has put both Apache Kafka and MQTT (or better said a combination of them) as communication mechanism at the heart of all its Industry 4.0 solutions.
Once integration has been achieved (stage two) and new data have become accessible (stage three) also the understanding and exploitation of these data (upper stages) is better performed one step at a time, following the company growth in “self-conscience and awareness”.
An Use Case: Pastificio Mantovanelle Traceability System
Spazio IT has developed for Pastificio Mantovanelle a Traceability System. In fact the solution developed by Spazio IT is much more than a plain traceability application as the system:
- connects to the company’s ERP/CRM (developed by TeamSystem) to get the customers orders and convert them into production/packaging programs;
- sends the production/packaging programs to the SCADA applications (based on Siemens and Wonderware platforms) on the factory floor;
- gathers from the SCADA applications the actual status of the production and packaging activities;
- maintains a traceability database keeping track of all transformations that the row materials, ingredients, semi-finished and finished products have undergone through their preparation.
The adopted “glue” technologies used to connect the various, isolated and heterogenous devices, machines, controllers and ICT legacy systems have been SQL, OPC-DA, OPC-UA, S7 CP 1543-1, Apache Kafka and MQTT. In fact Spazio IT is completely agnostic in terms of enabling communication technologies.
Spazio IT as Industry 4.0 Solution Provider
Feel free to contact Spazio IT to implement your own Industry 4.0 Solution: a no frills – no risks solution based on the technologies and software systems you already have in house.