Industry 4.0: Creating a Standard

Estimated reading time: 18 minutes

Matties: Now when we look at materials though, the other huge benefit is reduction of cost, reduction of inventory and less materials sitting because instead of having material there 48 hours in advance, it's there 20 minutes in advance.  

Lavi Ben David: Yeah, and this is something that we’ve been doing for many years now. It's called material management, and basically this is something that we've done before Industry 4.0. This is where we have complete visibility of material across all manufacturing sites. We are also in a position where we can provide solutions for all generic equipment, regardless of which machines and tools you are using.

With the visibility of the right materials and the scheduled work orders, we make sure that materials are kept in the warehouse and are delivered just in time to the shop floor, just before they need them. We have a customer site where all the materials are being delivered by robots, as they need it, to go into the manufacturing line. The operator stays by the lines and they keep minimal manufacturing materials on the shop floor. When it is in inventory, we also form a transactional point of view and keep the material stock accurate in the supply chain management solution. The reordering mechanism is more efficient and provides huge savings on the materials.

Hoz: Some expensive components have a very short life and expiration. If you don't mix work orders and use it properly and program it in advance, so that you know exactly how to make the right order, you will lose money. It's not just talking about meeting some standards or that this is a nice trend that you need to adhere to, just look at the ROI. And of course, we also provide you with all the compliance requirements coming from the guys that sit at the top of the food chain or their customers.

Matties: When you order the material and manage it the way that you do, on a percentage basis, what sort of advantage have you brought for a customer??

Lavi Ben David: Close to 70% of the manufacturing costs is the labor to materials. It's a big money saver. With production, we can reduce the materials spending by around 70–80%. This is a very significant level. Now you can argue, "Okay, what's the ROI for that?" Usually, with our product there, the ROI is less than six months. They already advance all of their investment based on their saving of materials alone.

It's not only just on the arrivals of materials, but it's also on making sure the right materials go to the right place, because sometimes there could be leftover materials—materials not used on the next line but can be used in manufacturing. We're really optimizing the materials and material ordering all the way through the manufacturing site. It was huge savings for our customer that was using robots to collect leftover materials and put huge piles of materials on the shop floor. Now it's all clean and he just sends the robots to resupply to the machine.

Hoz: Just to give you an example, if you have a reel with 1,000 components and you want them on one work order. Let’s say you consume 700, what do you do with the rest? Do you put it back in the warehouse? First of all, once it has left the warehouse, the ERP system has an open balance. Now it turns into a work in progress and you cannot go back. You can go down to the finished goods, but you can’t go back. The 300 will probably stay there on the line. If they are lucky and there's another order they'll find something to do with it. If not, it will just be next to the machine in the trolley and then you will see it will add up. We eliminate this problem.

Matties: If you need 700, then 700 will show up and not 1,000.

Hoz: Exactly, and if you do have 1,000, we'll take care of the 300. We know in the production plan to use the next work order that will consume these 300 components and not others.

Matties: With the Industry 4.0 smart factory, there's a new kind of workforce that needs to emerge. It's not going to be the same kind of employee we've hired in the past. It's going to be somebody that might be more computer oriented, etc. How do you see it?

Hoz: To some extent they will be more computer oriented, but on the other hand we're going to make it very simple. You just connect it and it will work. Maybe at the engineering level there will be some people that will be more responsible. But it's not just about needing smarter people. We need people that will be more responsible because now they can extend the responsibility not just over one line, but it could be over a factory or even multiple factories. We can virtualize the manufacturing in Brazil from where I'm sitting now in China. It's giving them more responsibility, but they don’t necessarily need a higher IQ.

Lavi Ben David: We see also in China a lot of manufacturers, whether they are local or whether they are international, adapting those technologies and adapting to our software and using it for Industry 4.0 implementation.

Hoz: The nice thing about our solution is that we don't need to change everything that’s already in place. It shouldn't be an ERP system, in terms of the amount of implementation time that you have to put in or that you have to invest in order to implement that. We come in, connect the systems, get the data, collect the data, normalize it, and send it up.

Matties: You're standardizing the language, so that solves the problem and that's your advantage. Is there anything else that we should talk about that we haven't already covered?

Hoz: Maybe we can talk about decentralization, in terms of big data. Not to keep everything in one place, so you can put it at risk but decentralize it, or distribute it even.

Lavi Ben David: From a data collection perspective, instead of housing it in a centralized place that is in danger of failure when you have a complete shutdown, we decentralize it to a lot of small computers that can share and also store all the information, so it's decentralized at the collection level.

The last is big data, which suddenly everyone is collecting and there is a standard way to collect the data and everything is visible. We want to take this information in the big data capabilities and perform a sophisticated analysis and provide feedback to the designer and to the OEMs. We’ll provide them the visibility of how they can improve their products on the next cycle so it will be faster and have better quality with their design. This is really where the next step is from our perspective.  

Hoz: In my view, the world of manufacturing starts at the design level. It's very important to capture everything into one picture and really control, communicate, and exchange data between the different entities here and run it back and forth. Our goal is to connect everything together. Industry 4.0 is an important milestone for these businesses and for these manufacturing houses but for us, it has been for years in the making. We would like to create an ecosystem for every company that manufactures anything to be able to virtualize everything and feel like all their global manufacturing can be controlled over one basic machine.

Page 3 of 4

• < Previous Page
• Next Page >