Alright, if you’ve stayed with us so far, you’ve finally reached the end of this blog series. We’ve spent five articles going over the background, benefits and challenges, components and offerings related to Industry 4.0. You might be thinking, “This is all great, but what’s next?” How does you company move forward with a strategy for Industry 4.0 adoption? We’ll provide some direction for that in this final post by asking some thought-provoking questions.  Industry 4.0 Adoption 5-Step Plan In the Digital Operations Signals report referenced in post one of this blog series Microsoft outlines a simple 5-step plan that some businesses use for an Industry 4.0 adoption project:   Industry … Read more

Welcome back to the penultimate post in our Industry 4.0 series. In this post, we are going to look at how Industry 4.0 and Microsoft helps businesses with their modern factory adoption by providing services, tools and technologies to support the key components we reviewed.  Azure IoT Hub & Event Grid/Service Bus Topics   Ingest IoT sensor data from connected devices and then use event grid to push out the data to be consumed by other services in your enterprise architecture.  Azure IoT Edge   Run cloud workloads on the edge, faster and offline capable, containerized, including the ability to run AI and machine learning processes, custom services, etc.   Hololens2   Augmented reality … Read more

In today’s Industry 4.0 post, let’s look at some of the Industry 4.0 key components. Whether these components fit into your scenarios, or you need to consider others is dependent on your business case. For example, you may want to include cloud computing in your solution, but if your factory needs to be able to run in full isolation in the event of a network or power grid failure, then you can’t be dependent on cloud solutions, you need to use edge computing or local cloud instead. We’ve selected 5 components you should evaluate for your Industry 4.0 solution.  Industrial IoT as an Industry 4.0 Key Component Industrial IoT is a … Read more

In today’s post we’ll look at some of the Industry 4.0 challenges and risks presented by adopting it, to contrast with the benefits that we looked at in part two. Before adopting any strategy in this area, you should understand these challenges and see how they apply to your own business.  Cost of Industry 4.0 Adoption In part two we made the case that Industry 4.0 adoption will lead to lower costs over time and observed that the return on investment time for adopters was decreasing. Neither of these points eliminate the very real cost impact of adoption. There are significant costs, from replacing equipment with modern IoT connected options, … Read more

In part two of the Industry 4.0 blog series let’s look at a few of the great benefits of adoption. More and more companies are increasingly adopting strategic approaches around digital transformation. The benefits of leaning in to new digital tools build on each other to yield undeniable outcomes for companies that successfully execute these strategies.  Industry 4.0 – Visibility  With highly connected devices and a vast amount of data within arm’s reach, the modern factory becomes visible in ways it never could before. Real time monitoring and big data analysis puts this all front and center for everyone from top level executive to factory floor worker, at any time.  … Read more