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Can AI Enable Smart Factory and Realize Industry 4.0 Vision?

By Sachin Andhare

Accelerate Digital Journey for Manufacturers with AI Automation Smart factory technologies that leverage the industrial internet of things (IIoT), edge computing, autonomous vision systems, and AI and Machine Learning can significantly improve cost, throughput, quality, safety and provide revenue growth. Despite the benefits, a recent Deloitte survey showed that only 5% of US manufacturers had fully converted at least one smart factory, while about 30% reported ongoing smart factory initiatives. AI is critical for Smart Factory enablement, and Implementing AI in industrial operations is challenging. Many solutions are designed for greenfield (new factories) projects and do not address complex data management, challenging legacy machinery integration, enterprise security requirements, real-time analytics, and the capability to handle thousands of models in the production environment. A fundamental problem is finding skilled people to develop and deploy AI. Global manufacturing leaders often rely on citizen data scientists – subject matter experts with domain knowledge…

AI Automation To Enable Smart Manufacturing

By Sachin Andhare

Heavy industries such as Steelmaking are ramping up digital transformation initiatives to improve throughput, efficiency, safety, and reliability of their operations. Metals, mining, and machine tool building companies are embarking on multi-year journeys to digitize operations by adding connectivity, automation, and advanced analytics.  According to McKinsey, most heavy-industry sectors are at the middle stages of digital maturity (Digital 2.0) relying on rule-based automation and distributed control systems.  Some have made progress in digital maturity (Digital 3.0) and are using collaborative robots and advanced process control systems. However, a few digital pioneers are leveraging AI Automation and applying Machine Learning (ML) to operational data (Digital 4). These digital leaders offer powerful lessons that others can emulate and follow to successfully deploy ML at scale.  Drowning in Sensor Data  With the ubiquitous sensor network and pervasive connectivity in industrial manufacturing, data from production machines has continued to grow at an unprecedented scale. …