ways

Industry 4.0
is transforming
the shop floor
A sneak preview into the
future of manufacturing

Brent Seely
CHIEF INNOVATION OFFICER
FACTORA

www.factorasolutions.com
The internet is an invasive
beast, uprooting tradition
wherever it strikes.

What digital influences

are uprooting your shop
floor today?

What will the future

look like?
CONTENTS
CONNECTED OPERATORS 1
Data becomes conversation

CONNECTED SYSTEMS 3
New top layer makes a connected,
consistent interface affordable

I/O FOR ANALYTICS 5

Leveraging IIoT to bypass control systems
and build connectivity

IT AND OT BECOME DT 7
How do you get to DT? Through IT and OT

WORKFORCE TRAINING 9
New systems need to be as intuitive
as your phone apps

PERSONALIZED PRODUCTS & MOQ 11

Tying it together to create ever
more customized products

WIP TRACKING 13
Uber-like apps to track and find
WIP on the shop floor

REAL-TIME SCHEDULING 15
Scheduling becomes live and dynamic

CLOUD vs EDGE vs LOCAL 17

New hybrid model is increasingly built
into systems architecture

FIND YOUR FUTURE 19

1 CONNECTED
OPERATORS
TODAY
Ask today’s typical 60-year-old operator about work
instructions, and he’ll tell you that over his career he’s
received them verbally, through scribbled notes, on a
print-out or spreadsheet, and, more recently, through
one or more screens.
But while the number of screens is rising, requiring
some operators to monitor over a dozen, the
instructions are still, essentially, in list form –
unprioritized.

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1 CONNECTED OPERATORS

FUTURE

Soon, that operator’s day will be quite different.

The Connected Operator’s safety

glasses will have a high-resolution
screen in the upper corner, giving
intelligent guidance and instruction
all day long. Rather than look to
several screens, he has an integrated,
ever-present dynamic interface.

Work instructions are always up

to date – dynamically helping the
operator to prioritize. The glasses
have their own mic – data becomes
conversation. The operator and glasses work together to get
the job done, with the glasses briefing at start of day (“You need
to change the torque setting on Line 3 to 7.5”) and helping to
problem-solve.

Dive a bit further into the future, and the glasses will have a micro-
camera that the operator uses to read barcodes, pass on trouble-
shooting information, and inspect materials.

All of this is possible; the technology is here. There are just a few
problems to work out (e.g. a lightweight 12-hour battery) and the
need to knit it all together.

But that conversation is coming, and it’s just around the corner.

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2 CONNECTED
SYSTEMS
TODAY
Walk into a chemical plant to take a look at
operations. You might come across 50 different
systems, created by 50 different developers, with
50 different interfaces.
Plant leadership realizes that this is far from
ideal, but trying to re-write all these systems to
make them more harmonious, with a consistent
User Experience (UX), is out of the question. Too
laborious, too expensive.

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2 CONNECTED SYSTEMS

FUTURE

Now it’s possible to create a new surface layer to connect those

50 systems that:
• Provides a consistent user interface
• Allows all the systems to communicate to each other.

Instead of 50 systems with 10 screens each, we can routinely

coalesce raw data and information and interaction onto one
screen, so that our chemical plant ends up with a total of 20
(consistent!) screens for the entire plant, as opposed
to 500.
Training is simplified. Errors decrease. Overall efficiency rises.

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3 I/O FOR
ANALYTICS
TODAY
You have a tank with water flowing in. At the bottom
a pump pumps the water elsewhere. This involves
transmitters, motors and valves to start, stop, open,
close, check if the tank is empty, and so on. All of
which is wired to your control system – resulting in,
say, 20,000 inputs and outputs over the totality of
your plant.
But the reality is, only 25-50% of these are actually
needed for control. The rest are (theoretically) used for
analysis and monitoring.
And wiring is costly. To add, for example, a
temperature measure, the transmitter, cabling,
labelling, junction boxes, I/O cards, and connections
to control system and MES would be $2,000 or more.

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3 I/O FOR ANALYTICS

FUTURE

That temperature measurement device now runs around $20-$50.

And it’s equipped with Bluetooth, LoRa and/or WIFI, eliminating
the cost and complexity of wiring. It is self-powered or has a very
long-lasting battery.

Which means the number of I/O connections will skyrocket.

Through Bluetooth, LoRa and WIFI, data will be sent directly to
Azure, Amazon, AWS, and Watson for cloud analytics.

Example: It’s now common to buy specialized equipment from

a manufacturer with included instrumentation and controls for a
specific task – e.g. a thermoformer needs the right temperatures
and pressures to make yogurt cups; once you add 300
temperature sensors, you’ll reject a lot less yogurt cups. Where
you once had zero sensors, and today have 10-20, in the future
you’ll have hundreds.

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4 IT AND OT
BECOME DT
TODAY

In the early 2000s, shop floor hardware moved away

from being stand-alone and proprietary – with its own
standards and software – to generic servers. With that,
OT – Operational Technology – arrived on the scene.
IT looks after business requirements, while OT looks
after technology that affects the shop floor. OT keeps
a firm handle on its mandate – if IT wants to install a
new patch for Chrome, OT prevents or puts up barriers.
Considerations such as safety and downtime are not
taken lightly.
But running two separate technical fiefdoms was never
going to be a long-term solution.

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4 IT AND OT BECOME DT

FUTURE

DT – digitization technology.
DT is based on creating a digital
copy of the physical world. Imagine
simulating a beer cellar in real-time
with a software model, using data
to emulate measures such as the
pressure, temperature, and CO2
concentration of every fermenter,
maturation vessel, filter, and so on.

Think of it as:
• Using IT and OT
• Adding artificial intelligence in the DT realm
• Feeding the model info back into OT through IT’s infrastructure.

To put it another way, DT needs IT and OT skillsets. In factories with

smart leadership, that need will form the critical bond between IT
and OT that paves the road to ongoing improvement.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

For manufacturing, AI is tricky. Every machine is different, so

it’s hard to acquire enough data for accurate modeling. But AI
software tools are increasingly sophisticated.

Machines can make recommendations or even take those actions

themselves, based on their predictions. SHAZAM! – our operator
gets an update on his glasses: “X is about to occur – change the
torque setting on Line 3 to 7.5.”

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5 WORKFORCE
TRAINING
TODAY

An operator learning a new system is sent to a

room for a week to run simulations. When there are
questions, or aspects of the system that aren’t clear,
they look to the manual for answers.

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5 WORKFORCE TRAINING

FUTURE

Successful systems are becoming inherently obvious to use.

Increasingly, the process is like adding an app to your phone –
if an operator understands the equipment and the job, training
on a new system isn’t needed.

Operators moving to rapid-reaction, fighter-pilot mode

More and more systems make decisions, and/or guide. The

system identifies and mentions outliers: “Hey Operator, this
number doesn’t look good. And here’s another one that may
be wonky, check it out too.”)

Our Future Operator can manage five machines, not just one.
Instead of dealing with one issue an hour, it’s one every ten
minutes.

It’s a move from ocean-liner-style – planning a change half an

hour ahead – to fighter-pilot; our Future Operator regularly
makes split-second decisions. With, of course, a ton of help
from their systems.

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6
PERSONALIZED
PRODUCTS
& MOQ MINIMUM ORDER
QUANTITY

TODAY
Plants produce standardized products. Line changes
are slow, cumbersome, and scheduled to be as
infrequent as possible. The first 5-10 minutes of
production are discarded – the temperature is
wrong, the glue is not
applied correctly, and
so on. It’s normal and
accepted to fill the
equivalent of a small
office with rejects that
go to landfill.

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6 PERSONALIZED PRODUCTS & MOQ

FUTURE

Personalized products – the concept is now viable, and a sign of

things to come.

Let’s take Sarah, who likes the scent of

strawberry. She orders an air freshener with
that scent (maybe some vanilla too) on
Amazon, maybe with her picture on the
box. She accepts the higher cost, it’s worth
it to her.

Of course, all this demands that a plant:

• Drive down its minimum order quantity (MOQ).
• Revise how lines operate. Single-purpose lines are being
replaced by multi-purpose lines with multiple filler heads,
printers, case packers, palletizers, and so on.
• Decrease line-change waste to the volume of a small pail. Or less.
All of these changes impact each other. To move from
manufacturing one type of diaper to another, 1000 settings may
need to be changed. Only with strong DT can we efficiently arrive
at what the optimal settings are.

About .1% of manufacturers have figured out how to sustainably

deliver personalized products. But the wave has started, and the
sub-components are here.

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7 WIP WORK IN
PROGRESS

TRACKING
TODAY
Every manufactured product has intermediate stages,
aka Work In Progress (WIP). And WIP has traditionally
been difficult to track and manage.
Let’s use the example of a tire plant. Making a tire
starts with rubber. Because it’s organic, that rubber is
unstable until cured. Anything not processed within a
few days must be discarded.
During its time in the plant, that rubber is mixed
and combined with various additives and chemicals,
resulting in various types of rubber that must be kept
separate.
In the old days, meaning today, after each process an
operator would create a paper label and stick it to the
pallet. Our tire factory has, at any moment, about 3,000
pallets of WIP.
Mistakes get made. Products gets misplaced, or lost ,
or if organic, break down. Semi-manufactured parts are
discarded, in the hundreds and thousands.

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7 WIP TRACKING

FUTURE

Smart labels. Every time a pallet is moved, a scanner reads

it and knows its location. Built-in geo-positioning will allow
items to be tracked throughout the manufacturing process.
In essence, labels will be able to say “Here I am!” Through
their smart glasses, operators will use Uber-like software to
guide them to a component, and AR will make that pallet
turn a certain colour, say green, once they are close. For plants
that supplement manual movement with SGVs (self-guided
vehicles), better tracking enables greater efficiency.

The result is fewer pallets, less confusion, less hunting and

tracking, and more just-in-time production.

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8 REAL-TIME
SCHEDULING
TODAY
Every Thursday, the planning department looks at
orders for the next 3-4 weeks and makes a schedule,
fine-tuning and tweaking and adding each week.
But that system doesn’t work with Sarah’s Strawberry
Scent. How do you order the strawberry and vanilla
fragrances at the right time, in the right amounts?

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8 REAL-TIME SCHEDULING

FUTURE

Real-time scheduling. Every time anything gets made or

ordered, the schedule is recalculated and re-optimized. It’s a
living thing.
This ties in with increasingly smaller MOQs, better WIP tracking,
decreased inventory, faster line changes, and manufacturing
a broader range of products. All this comes back to the
scheduling system, and a complete retooling of the traditional
planning department. Artificial intelligence will make real-time
decisions based upon everything that is happening. Planners,
in this new world, will manage guidelines and constraints,
“teaching” the system to make the best decisions.

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9 CLOUD vs EDGE
vs LOCAL
TODAY
Cloud and Local
Local. With Local, if there’s an internet drop, everything
keeps working. Until recently, Local was the only
choice for plants with inadequate internet service.
Cloud. Cloud servers offer two notable advantages:
• Reliability. With the Cloud business model, many
organizations contribute, enabling a high level of
service. Technical failures drop significantly.
• Horsepower. The discovery that the GPUs
invented for video games were equally impressive
for analytics led to specialized machine-learning
chips that blaze through analytics algorithms.
Today, about 100,000-200,000 of these items are
manufactured per year, snapped up by Amazon,
Google, IBM and Microsoft for their Cloud servers.
If you want to crank serious amounts of data, the
Cloud is the only way to go.

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9 CLOUD vs EDGE vs LOCAL

FUTURE

Edge is the in-between alternative, a hybrid that’s only been

available for 2-3 years. Edge allows manufacturers to run a bare
minimum of critical work on the local network, protecting it
from downtime, but any other work, particularly analytical work,
goes to the Cloud.
Manufacturers get the best of both worlds with Edge
computing, which is increasingly added to system architecture.

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FIND YOUR
FUTURE
Which developments would make the
most difference to your profitability?

Do you need an expert team to build the

business case, quantify the payoff, identify
the best technology, and guide you along
the most efficient path?

Talk to us at Factora. Every day, we help

midsize to world-leading manufacturers
travel further and faster along the road to
Industry 4.0. In particular, talk to us if you’d
like to do it right the first time – it’s our
specialty.
Brent Seely, Chief Innovation Officer

Brent Seely’s career has taken him through a

vast array of industries – from the jungles of
Indonesia to the boardrooms of North America,
and almost everywhere in between. He is widely
respected for his extensive knowledge of MES
and his deep understanding of what Industry 4.0
brings to manufacturing.

Brent is Factora’s primary Solution Architect,

working with the Professional Services team
on new industries, technologies and concepts.
With an unwavering focus on improving
manufacturing competitiveness, Brent devotes a
considerable part of each day to keeping abreast
of – and often ahead of – advances in areas such
as UX, AR, VR, Analytics and Cloud.

Connect with Brent on LinkedIn

Experts in guiding manufacturers
on the journey to Industry 4.0

For more information, please contact us

Toll Free (US/Canada): 1.888.475.4676
International: 1.678.813.2332
FactoraSolutions.com

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