Creating a Live Industry – Powerful Industry 4.0 Applications with a Smarter Enterprise Digital Assistant

Time to transform your industry into a real-time Live Industry.

Manufacturing companies are under pressure to increase productivity while producing high-quality, individualized products in a constantly changing environment and to varying customer demands. Many industries have strategically prioritized utilizing Industry 4.0 technologies supported by an Enterprise Digital Assistant (EDA) to turn these requirements into opportunities. The result? They are transforming into Live Industries. But what’s an EDA and how does that support a Live Industry? Read on for the answer.

What kinds of technologies are prevalent in Industry 4.0? Get the run-down here!

The Industry 4.0 Revolution

Industry 4.0, or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), is industrial transformation driven by new age digital technologies that have made it feasible to capture and analyze data across machines and business systems, enabling faster, more flexible, and more efficient processes to produce individualized products with higher quality at a lower cost. EDAs have made it possible for business users to track and audit production processes, thus making transformation live. Technological innovations like IoT, edge and cloud computing, Big Data lakes, artificial intelligence, sensors, autonomous systems, cognitive AI, RPAs, and digital twins are drivers for this revolution. Yet, it should be noted that producing value from Industry 4.0 with live assistance from an EDA needs an industry-specific approach as business goals and challenges vary by industry or by organization.

Live Industry Strategy

With SAP‘s various digital solutions, along with the EDA’s value addition, you can achieve Live Industry transformation in your enterprise. You can build intelligent, individualized products by connecting each customer’s demand to everything from product planning to delivery. You can also create a production process that adapts dynamically to different demands, structures, and workflows, while using intelligence and business networks to integrate every machine, partner, and employee. Plus, you can connect the entire company with a live assistant – bringing together logistics, sales, and service – so every step is orchestrated and monitored, which enables you to avoid the gaps or delays that keep you from delivering the best-possible experience to customers.

How else does an EDA assist SAP? Check out our infographic!

Live Industry Components

The approach to the Live Industry combines four business components into one leading strategy:

Customer focus: their input and preferences are the base of everything.
Production reinvention: using intelligent business systems and processes that dynamically adapt to changing priorities and deliver scaled customization.
Connect the entire company: orchestrating, sales, service, and logistics with production to transform the way you work.
Integrating EDA into everything: this includes live tracking and monitoring processes, as well as auto healing broken processes and failures.

An Example of a Live Industry

High-volume productionmanufacturers mainly focus on their plant’s operational efficiency and seamlessness. This concentration also includes electrical and electronic manufacturers. Such an enterprise combines automated manufacturing, live monitoring and manual assembly into one digital process, enabling digitally networked manufacturing and leading to harmonized global production processes. Customer interactions are closely integrated with manufacturing operations and have centralized and standardized master data. They have also simplified user interfaces on the shop floor by using natural language digital instructions, which allows them to go paperless, and have also implemented active process interlocking and control. Manufacturing equipment is set up automatically under active assistance with parameters taken from the production order; additionally, material and tool setup is verified and tracked, while traceability information is collected automatically, thus increasing process stability. This has resulted in increased flexibility, more robust processes, higher uptime, and the reduction of capital employed.

Live Industry Drivers

We believe the Live Industry has four drivers, each providing distinct values to business and making new products more personalized, connected, prompted, and intelligent. Intelligent products are built and configured to meet customer needs. Intelligent factories use data and intelligence to run autonomously and deliver customized products at a high scale. Empowered people are equipped with all the tools and information to do their best work. A live assistant via an EDA monitors and auto heals the intelligent factories processes, empowering people to run it seamlessly and efficiently.

A tangible example can be seen in smart clothes such as personalized sport shoes. These shoes are produced and shipped according to the desires of the consumer.

Intelligent products:

These connect to intelligent applications* that help the consumer assist with sports performance. Additionally, these intelligent shoes provide information to the manufacturer’s design department to identify improvement points for designing and developing the next generation of sport shoes.

Empowered people:

During the production of the shoes, the supervisor, designer, and worker are supported by IT systems and digital assistants* that empower them in their daily routines and (unforeseen) events.

Intelligent factories:

The intelligent systems, applications, and live assistant* share health and other indicators with the producer, who uses this information to keep the machine up and running. The producer can also use this information to improve the next production of sports shoes.

*Note – Live Assistant is assisting the other three drivers of Live Industry.

Stefanini gets smart manufacturing. Learn more about our methodologies here!

Stefanini’s Solutions

When it comes to Industry 4.0, Stefanini has a long history of connecting assets to optimize data insights. With our approach, you’ll be able to do more with less and apply new technologies to predict your tomorrow.

With SAP, Stefanini will help you seamlessly transition into an Intelligent Enterprise. With support from our AI-enabled Enterprise Digital Assistant, you’ll get support in five areas of business: