Making Industry 4.0 a Sustainable Revolution

Sustainability has taken on an extended meaning for many businesses.

Climate change affects what we produce and the way we sell those products. We now need to implement social and environmental strategies when we pursue our businesses development activities.

To create a sustainable business today, it must be one that successfully covers social, environmental and profitability goals to deliver a positive triple bottom line.

Unlocking Industry 4.0 Technologies

The time is right to use all the tools we have available.

The merging of virtual and physical has been the most positive development underlining Industry 4.0. It has ignited the imagination of business and academia. Even the consumer is benefiting through exciting new market entrants, accelerated new product model releases and more engaging user experiences.

The connections between product (virtual and physical) and user experience are allowing us to extract crucial information that informs further product development.

And while Industry 4.0 will continue to inspire innovation for many years to come there is now so much proven technology that you can use today. Waiting to see what happens next is no longer an option.

Industry 4.0 has brought together many of the technologies that we need to sustain our business and create a developing platform that will support our business as it grows and evolves.

Sustainable Growth in the Pervasive Society

Engineering has become the powerhouse of creation.

The management of your businesses’ product information is product data merged with intellectual property. The essential resources of your company.

Everything that makes you unique resides within a single version of the truth to drive your suppliers, manufacturing and distribution/service networks.

Next generation PLM systems, such as the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, employ the virtual product environment to develop your products. But if they lack actual product use data then they won’t help you grow as fast as you potentially could.

Think of it as connecting the final stakeholder. In the pervasive society, even your existing product has a vested interest in your business success. It will never reach its full potential unless it can contribute to its own development.

Sustainable Innovation and Business Development

Go beyond carbon neutral to make a considerable, positive impact.

Being greener than the competition is more important to the consumer than ever before.

Data, and the information we create from it, drives insights that are essential to future innovation and business development. Where Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) devices allow us to connect the user experience and enable super lean manufacturing it’s the Cloud and Big Data that can ensure it happens efficiently and effectively.

Cloud offers uniquely efficient and feature rich computing that is scalable, up to date and secure. Cloud also enables a common platform to connect your products to your business across international boundaries and is ideally suited to be the media for your IoT generated Big Data.

Final Thoughts

Industry 4.0 closes the loop

As we see the virtual product development environment improving, we will become less dependent on prototyping. Significant reductions in new product development times and time to market are being achieved in most industries. This makes for considerable cost savings for the company and for the environment.

Supplementing the subjective user experience with actual in service data doesn’t take the user out of the loop. In fact, the data works in parallel to provide a more complete picture that includes emotion as well as hard fact.

This new level of detail can enable new product direction, preventative maintenance, swift issue identification and removal.

Industry 4.0 technologies enable us to connect all the stakeholders, including product, into a resource for sustainability and future development in the pervasive society.

Join us as we explore digitalisation for a sustainable future at PLMIF 2019.