Byron's Babbles

Today, our Indiana delegation in Germany spent the morning in Paderborn at the Benteler Vocational Training Center and then the afternoon touring the Benteler Automotive Plant. Because Benteler is 30,000 employees strong at 144 locations in 39 countries, they believe a company is the sum of all its employees. In other words, Benteler has 30,000 “guaranteers of success.” As a side note, 5,000 of those employees are in Indiana.

While visiting with Benteler officials and students, we learned more about five new and emerging areas in manufacturing and industry:

1. Smart glasses
2. Digital maintenance
3. Predictive maintenance
4. Smart production
5. Work 4.0

These are all areas that both the manufacturing sector and education sector need to be area of and talking about together. This all further drove home the point about why we, in Indiana (and I am sure all over the U.S and Europe) to continue to replicate the great work that Horizon Education Alliance is doing to facilitate bringing together all the stakeholders to develop solutions for educating our young people to be ready for the workforce of tomorrow.

Smart Glasses

Smart glasses can collect information from internal or external sensors. It may control or retrieve data from other instruments or computers.

Digital Maintenance

Digital solutions applied to maintenance can considerably improve asset reliability and reduce operating expenditure by predicting equipment failures, streamlining supply chain, reducing unplanned and planned maintenance and increasing production efficiency. Equipment can be set up with a digital inspection plan, run-to-failure, condition based maintenance, preventive maintenance or predictive maintenance strategy.

Predictive Maintenance

In a predictive system, employees and systems can anticipate and act before issues or challenges arise, rather than simply reacting to them after they occur. This feature can include identifying anomalies, restocking and replenishing inventory, identifying and predictably addressing quality issues, and monitoring safety and maintenance concerns. The ability of the smart factory to predict future outcomes based on historical and real-time data can improve up-time, yield, and quality, and prevent safety issues. Artificial intelligence can also be used to predict when something will fail or need to be replaced.

Smart Production

Smart Production or Manufacturing and the Smart Factory enables all information about the manufacturing process to be available when and where it is needed across entire manufacturing supply chains and product life-cycles. This Smart manufacturing, or Industry 4.0 as it is also referred to, is the process that employs computer controls, modeling, big data and other automation to improve manufacturing efficiencies.

Work 4.0

Work 4.0 was the most intriguing topic of the day as it is really about the interaction of humans and machines (eg. robots). The use of pulleys in early antiquity or the Babylonians’ use of pumps to irrigate fields can be regarded as early examples of human-machine interaction. Now we have reached a whole new level of connectedness and interaction. Industry 4.0 has brought humans and machines to an almost human-like connection with emotions and feelings. The digital interconnection of all workers, tools and work-pieces in the production process and across company boundaries is generating an “Internet of Things (IoT).” This means we are going to need to be educating and training on new things. We will also need to educate on the benefits. We will need to answer the question for those we are educating: “How will this make my life easier?” It won’t just work to outline the financial benefits or improvements to the bottom line.

I’ve heard it said on this trip that technology is not the issue, it is the enabler. We will need to be teaching our students how to use the data and the technology. All of this is going to allow us to move from reactive to predictive and preventative (artificial intelligence). Human-machine interaction is taking on a new dimension due to developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Because of AI there are now robots capable of interacting with humans. These are call “cobots.” No longer does the robot replace the human, but actually works along-side the human.

Are you ready to lead and educate in a Work 4.0 environment? 4.0 is here and we need to be having the conversations about how to have our workforce ready. You ready to have the conversation?