Last exhibitions show the grandest promotion of Industry 4.0 and digital manufacturing. What it means for the workshop?
Till today industry made a big grow with digital solutions – numerical systems and CNC controls offer flexible possibilities not only for standard control of the machine during the working cycle but exchange of the information to control the machine in global chain of the workshop. Yes, all additional things have nothing for small workshop but imagine what means to develop the digital chain for the big factory!
Parts with the passing of the stages with the barcodes and control of each location of the part, flow management, machine status management, global network for engineers and technical specialists for import and export of parts, personnel control, cloud technologies – all the things for develop most modern factory which you could imagine. Industry 4.0 is closely connected with the Internet, wireless data transfer technologies, clouds and digital solutions. Sure thing any industrial computer can offer network data transfer but the question is not to operate the machine but to create the virtual factory with the possibility to manage everything only with your display from any place of the world.
Most of manufacturers today offer the advantages of the Internet service and diagnostic but in general today this is the one future only for the global network connection. Modern drawings are made in 3D CAD but are situated only inside the network of the factory or the single computer of the engineer.
The future offers more global solution with including of the manufacturer, customers and producers together with the machine, flow and production activities in global chains where the customer can control the flow of his order, manufacturer can control the machines, automatically orders customer can send directly to the machine for production, global control from the management side and as the result - the clean and very effective relations between all the parties with much less involved people but the global transfer of the information. People there are not the workers but the operators of manufacturing world and who knows, probably involved also in new generation social networks dedicated to the new material flows.