By Pat Dixon, PE, PMP
President of DPAS, (DPAS-INC.com)
Most of our discussion of Industry 4.0 has focused on connecting facilities to the rest of the enterprise through the Internet. What if your entire enterprise is a single site?
Your company may have a single paper machine. All of the operations people are in the same building with the process equipment and control system. On the same property in a building right next to the mill is the corporate office where all company executives have their offices. To connect the control system in the mill to servers running MES and ERP applications, you just need to run ethernet cables between the buildings. You don't need to remotely connect across the Internet between the corporate office and the mill. Is this Industry 4.0?
While this mill may be internally connected, it is not externally connected. Most people within the enterprise can connect from the plant floor to the top of the enterprise without Internet connectivity, but your sales agents won't be connected when they are at a client location. Your process control and IT people will not be able to remotely connect from their home in the middle of the night when they need to diagnose and fix a problem. Beyond the connectivity of personnel internal to the enterprise, external resources like vendors need connectivity if they are going to do remote monitoring and engineering.
Another benefit of Industry 4.0 connectivity is the ability to host applications in the cloud. For those applications that don't require realtime response and determinism, the cloud offers outsourcing of responsibility for capital and maintenance.
Industry 4.0 applies to every manufacturer at every scale.
