Espresso 4.0 by
Wizata
As someone with quite a lot of experience in wearing different hats in the industry, you started as an engineer in airspace, then went into sales, then digitalization. Now you started your own consulting company aimed at the digital transformation of industries with hands-on experience in production, what do you consider the biggest value drivers for digital transformation?
Biggest Value Drivers of Industry 4.0
Putting my bio shortly in this manner sounds like an interesting journey. I picked up a lot of experiences and knowledge from every job because they are from different perspectives.
The main value drivers I see in the Industry 4.0 would be process and resource optimization, leading to cost reduction and/or revenue increase or even generating new business models with a more customer-centric approach.
After that, I would say machines, people, processes, and the environment connected in a single working organism or a digital enterprise and time to market reduction. The experience from the already implemented projects suggests that, typically, industry 4.0 can reduce time to market from 20% to 50%.
The other value driver would be improving quality. Scrap and products requiring rework lead to extra costs for machine operating time, materials, or labor. Also, we have digital warehouses where organizations can reduce inventory costs by 20% to 50% just by harnessing solutions such as real-time supply chain optimization.
We also have to mention additive manufacturing, which solves or cuts many supply chain issues. Big data analytics or big data decision-making, either semi-automatic with minimal human intervention or using AI for full automation.
Lastly, predictive and prescriptive maintenance are based purely on data analytics and trends.
Biggest Challenges of Digitalization
What are you finding as the biggest challenge with helping Small and Medium Enterprises digitalize, and how do you address it?
Nowadays, my main focus is providing consultancy to SMEs who want to grow. Yet, they find their current digitalization state insufficient, not optimal, with many unknown processes inherited from Industry 2 and the employees' mindset to merely finish the work and not to improve.
Even though it sounds quite depressing to know that most companies on the market are still operating in this way, this also creates a great opportunity for those companies to make a small change and create a great impact.
The greatest challenge I see working with various clients is that they really don't know what industry 4.0 or digital transformation is. They hear these buzzwords and put their expectations too high or too low. The first topic to discuss with them is putting the right expectations in place by educating the client and performing the digital maturity assessment.
With this assessment, the client themselves and we learn about the level of their digital maturity, how they operate, and comparison to their competitors - meaning the same size SMEs in the same industry.
This assessment helps clients understand the process and realize where they want to be in digitalization and, after setting the initiatives, how to get there. These initiatives are planned with respect to urgency, implementation, time, resources, and, of course, the budget.
So, how important is it that SMEs digitalize, and what can they expect as a benefit of digitalizing?
There are a lot of benefits - even with a small change, it can be felt almost immediately. There are long-term benefits. Considering almost 99% of the market is SMEs, the competition is high, and the margins are low. They need to change something in the way they do business. Digitalization gives them that solution.
With digitalization, they can significantly reduce their operational costs or increase the productivity of either the people or the machines. They can create new business models to address customers or develop new products. They can increase the security of their IP, automate many manual or repetitive tasks and processes, and so on.
Cool Future Industry 4.0 Tech
What's something cool you witnessed recently regarding tech you can tie into industry 4.0?
Technology is pushing us towards a futuristic way of operating a corporation. The coolest technology that I saw is actually not from my work, but it's something that I am very interested in. It's related to Agritech and brings several Industry 4 technologies into one product that automatically grows vegetables or fruit gardens.
To be honest, I am interested and passionate about Agritech and sustainable living, and I find this product a perfect example of how technology can help us become self-sustainable and work towards a greener future.
Implementing these industry 4.0 technologies into something that no one actually thought about before is something amazing to me.
So to clarify, it's like a fleet of robots that can work the field?
It's not a fleet, it's one robotic arm, but it works in a small garden area where, with certain software, you can plan the seeding of the plants, monitor, can even have full control of weeds, et cetera.
It is an automatic garden for yourself with a minimum effort, except for planning which you still have to do. It gives you a self-sustainable plan. So I believe it's quite something that each of us should have.
