Audience Opinion Piece

Industry 4.0 – A Myth or Reality?

You have often heard Data is the new oil. Manufacturers have been inundated with data and they have been grappling to make sense of it through developing dashboards and drive their continuous improvement activities to drive productivity.

The value is created when these team of engineers and analysts are solving problems on the shop floor to improve productivity as opposed to wrangling with data. This is where Intelycx (https://intelycx.com), a leading provider of SaaS for manufacturing organizations plays a significant role.

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The Connectivity challenge

The challenge to connect manufacturing equipment stems from the variety of equipment controllers using myriads of communication protocols that have been in operation for decades. Manufacturers agree that connecting equipment and having visibility to real time data will improve their productivity by 20% - 30%.

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The Infrastructure challenge

Data is no longer structured, and it is no longer the bits and bytes generated by the machines. Data from a shop floor is multimodal – use of images, videos, and unstructured data from the operators, etc. are being used to capture and understand shop floor issues in real time.

Data volume has more than quadrupled and having the required infrastructure adds to cost and complexity. Use of IoT gateway devices and cloud-based systems for storage and processing real time analytical routines mitigates the technological challenges and costs.

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Data Overload and Actionable Information

The workforce of the present and future will be overloaded and overwhelmed with data if it is not managed and used in the appropriate manner. Use of automated routines to detect anomalies and alerting the right user at the right time to take the required action will supercharge the shop floor teams while increasing collaboration and improving productivity.

40% of manufacturers have expressed in a survey that though they have systems in place to collect data, their data is often siloed. It is often too late when their traditional methods of analytics fail to deliver actionable intelligence at the appropriate time.

Intelycx’s real time orchestration system excels at collecting various levels of data through equipment connectivity and other legacy systems. Through use of the cloud infrastructure and its real time analytics engine, it provides real time analytics at the user’s fingertips to act in real time.

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The Digital Divide

While technology has helped to solve the data collection and data collation problem, challenges still loom with data consumption and value creation. This is often tied to the humans who are part of this transformation. Questions one must ask – is what is being presented to the end user – is it useful and meaningful or just another dashboard. Gone are the days when clunky interfaces on a manufacturing shop floor used to be the norm.

The new digital native worker expects a seamless experience between their personal life and work life. Providing contextual data, providing actionable information, and providing intuitive interfaces to the end user will increase engagement, their user experience and improve productivity. Systems should be designed with the end-user in mind, and they should be at left, right and center for any system to take-off.

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Generative AI

One must agree that the advent of Gen AI tools has created a tectonic shift in how people consume technology. It is impacting every facet of the business. Retirement of baby boomers, lack of skilled workforce in manufacturing, onboarding, and training of new employees have always been a challenge. Manufacturing industries have a huge opportunity to use their decades of experience to build their knowledge base into these Gen AI tools and drive continuity of their operations.

IRIS, Intelycx’s Gen AI assistant helps to solve this problem by collating the rich knowledge embedded in various documents and formats through an interactive conversational agent.

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Industry 4.0 Platform

Traditionally, manufacturing organizations have been using point systems that serve one need or another. This has led to a proliferation of data silos and custom non-standard workflows. While these systems were solving the problems of yesterday and today, it has been challenging for the end users to consume and drive value.

The next generation systems will be well integrated platforms where artificial intelligence / machine learning will do the heavy lifting of analytics while humans in the loop are executing the actions. These platforms will augment and enrich the work life of the end users while driving multifold improvements in productivity and value creation.

Why wait? – Visit us https://intelycx.com or schedule a call with us to learn more.

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