DIGITAL SPECIAL .... Inside the Digital Factory

Inside the Digital Factory

Cutting-edge technology gives a glimpse into the future of how things will get made, and what manufacturers must do to stay relevant.

The industrial world has been in the throes of digitization for well over a decade. Primarily through enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems (MES), critical planning, scheduling, warehousing, inventory management, and logistics processes have been automated and simplified. But these gains have been restricted to technology silos, supporting separate functions of the factory rather than improving the performance of the plant — and its extended supply chain — in a broader way.

Those days may finally be in the past, as manufacturers now have a golden opportunity to take advantage of digitization’s promised outsized benefits. The advent of complex smart sensors, artificial intelligence, big data pools, and robotics, combined with the vast connections of the cloud, is heralding a new era for manufacturers, marked by totally integrated factories that can rapidly tailor products to individual customer needs and respond instantly to shifting demands and trends. This fully digital factory can be a catalyst for a kinetic growth agenda delivering gains in productivity, financial and operational performance, output, and market share as well as improved control and visibility throughout the supply chain. The factories also foster improvements in safety, environmental sustainability, and the rightsizing of global factory footprints.

Sometimes known as Industry 4.0 (the first three industrial waves were built upon steam-engine mechanization, electricity and the assembly line, and the emergence of computers), the digital factory is a broad network featuring equipment from the catalog of the Internet of Things, integrated into an end-to-end ecosystem. This ecosystem includes internal functions — for instance, sales, procurement, engineering, and R&D — and external players, including suppliers and customers.

The contours of the digital factory are still evolving as technology advances, but in today’s nascent reckoning, it looks something like Fujitsu’s plant in Augsburg, Germany. At this site, an all-encompassing information technology backbone controls a supply “supermarket” where components for Fujitsu’s computers and other hardware products are stored. As customer orders are received, parts are picked for assembly by robots, loaded onto self-driving electric vehicles — which make up what’s known as the logistics train — and carried out to production stations using just-in-time and just-in-sequence processes. The specifications of each assembled product may differ and dynamic screens show workers precisely which components belong to each order and display detailed work instructions. Changes to product features can be made on the fly throughout the assembly process by on-site design and engineering teams, whose members are also available to respond to late shifts in customer requirements. Downtime is minimized because predictive maintenance procedures, based on historical and real-time data for each piece of equipment, automatically address incipient problems before a breakdown. The entire production process is paperless, the factory leaves virtually no carbon footprint, and the daily output of 12,000 PCs, laptops, and workstations and more than 1,000 servers ranks Fujitsu’s Augsburg plant among the most productive and cost-effective in the world.

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