Industry 4.0: what it means on a shop floor

Where the name comes from

The phrase was coined for a German government programme presented at Hannover Messe in 2011, and the number counts industrial revolutions: steam, electricity and the assembly line, computers and numerical control, and now connected production. The counting is a piece of marketing, but the thing being counted is real enough. What is new is not that a machine has a computer in it; a CNC machine has had one for fifty years. It is that the computers talk to each other and to the systems that plan the work.

What it looks like on an Indian shop floor

Stripped of the vendor deck, Industry 4.0 in a job shop is a short list of concrete things, and they are usually bought in this order.

Machine data capture comes first: reading spindle state, program name, feed override and alarms straight off the controller through an open protocol such as OPC UA or MTConnect, or through a retrofitted sensor on an older machine. From that comes a real OEE figure, and the first surprise is nearly always how much of the lost time is setup rather than breakdown.

Condition monitoring follows, using vibration and current signatures to schedule a spindle bearing change before it seizes. Then production scheduling and traceability, so an operator gets the right program and the right revision of the drawing and every part carries a record of which machine and which batch of material made it. Quality data goes back into the loop last, closing gauge readings back onto offsets.

Nothing on that list requires a new machine. Most of it is a retrofit, which is the point that gets lost when the phrase is used to sell one. Which builders ship controllers that expose those protocols, and which suppliers are selling retrofits into the Indian clusters, is followed in this site’s machine tool news from India.

SAMARTH Udyog Bharat 4.0

India’s public support for this sits with the Ministry of Heavy Industries, under its scheme on enhancing the competitiveness of the Indian capital goods sector. Phase I set up five experiential and demonstration facilities: the Centre for Industry 4.0 (C4i4) Lab in Pune, the IITD-AIA Foundation for Smart Manufacturing in New Delhi, I4.0 India at IISc Bengaluru, the Smart Manufacturing Demo and Development Cell at CMTI, and a set of data engineering skill centres. In Phase II, C4i4 Pune was given the job of establishing ten more centres around the country.

Their remit is awareness, training and consultancy rather than grants: a manufacturer can see the technology working on a real line, send people to be trained, and get advice on a pilot. For a firm classed as a micro or small enterprise that is the cheapest way to find out whether a proposal is worth the money before committing to it.

The test that separates it from a pitch

Ask what number the proposed system will produce, who will look at that number, and what they will do differently when it moves. A dashboard nobody opens is an expense. A system that tells the planner on Monday which machine lost eleven hours to setup last week, and lets him do something about it, has paid for itself.

The same test applies to the equipment that arrives wearing the label, from sensors on a press to a collaborative robot tending a machine. The data is only worth collecting if somebody acts on it.