What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

Today, many experts and academics claim that we are in the midst of a massive technological and industrial shift, one that will impact every aspect of society at a speed never before experienced in human history. Eric Dudeck, Associate Partner at Engineering North America, introduces the Fourth Industrial Revolution and explains why manufacturers should be paying attention. To learn more, email us at info@indx.com.

Full Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Eric Dudeck. I'm an Associate Partner with Engineering Industries eXcellence. We are identifying ourselves in the middle of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, which of course begs the question, what did the first three industrial revolutions look like? What was the same, what was different? Some of the commonalities we see in each of these four revolutions is how an upgrade or a revolution in technology has changed the way we produce materials, we manufacture, and distribute and effectively, how much things cost, what jobs are available, etc.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has a lot to do with offloading a lot of the more simple thinking problems to automation technologies. We're noticing that we're gathering a lot of data from a lot of different levels in a manufacturing environment. People are finding themselves making similar or the same decisions day after day. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is kind of an idea of how we're going to use concepts that are evolving in Big Data, machine learning, and Internet of Things to really gather quantities of data that are nearly impossible to visualize and analyze for a day-to-day human, but that computers can really process at much higher rates and make better decisions much more quickly...And even further, free up the humans from the more basic decision-making processes to the more complex and more value-added tasks.

We're kind of in the middle of this giant industrial shift and we're really not sure how it's going to shake out and how it's going to affect factories in the long run, but we've got some very informed, some very educated guesses on things that are going to happen based on how we've seen technology affect other fields, and the technologies that we know are developing in the pipeline right now.

One of the things we excel at Engineering is identifying where our customers are as far as their maturity model on the road to Industry 4.0, and taking an inventory of what systems they currently have, what systems are on their horizon, and perhaps informing them about what systems they haven't thought about yet...Then at that point, identifying opportunities for those systems to talk amongst themselves to increase the rate at which decisions are made, to make better decisions, and to control the process.

What's clear is that the software that's running in your factory and the ability of your varied software titles to efficiently communicate with each other is going to be fundamental in transitioning your manufacturing operation into the future state of this "Industry 4.0" paradigm. So that's one of the strong points of Engineering, helping you to sort through the noise and decide where do we start, where are we trying to get to, and what tools are we going to use to arrive.