INDUSTRY 4.0 IS BETTER!

INDUSTRY 4.0 IS BETTER!

I must confess something to you: I have heard speak a lot about industry 4.0!

It seems like there was no innovation yesterday, and that today, everyone has pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Anything is Industry 4.0 today!

I was tired of hearing a tide of technological salespeople and politicians.

People who want to teach me to make technological machines and don’t even know what they are talking about.

Almost, as a matter of principle, I almost never speak of it anymore…

BUT THE TRUTH IS SOMETHING ELSE!

Industry 4.0 will allow us to improve or production cycle and facilitate the use of machines.

Industry 4.0 means a thousand things. It is about augmented reality, the Internet of Tings, rapid prototyping, collaborative robots…

It is about so many things that no-one knows anymore where what is not understood ends and where what is begins.

It is difficult then to discern what automation is and industry 4.0 is complicated and I don’t think anyone can say with certainty where its limits are.

For sure Industry 4.0 means (for our sector) starting to have machines that are more integrated in the production process that allow us to give an added value to the product delivered.

Competing in the world market requires us to offer something extra to our customers.

Opting for Industry 4.0 is certainly a winning choice. Not because it is a way of looking pretty, but because it brings very interesting and economically profitable results.

Naturally the results are seen in the long term. The bets must be placed tomorrow, are you ready???

HOW TO CHANGE THE DEBURRING MACHINE WITH INDUSTRY 4.0

Until yesterday it was enough to press the pieces and deliver them.

Ultimately this is the true work of a casting foundry: transforming aluminium alloy blades into cast iron castings.

IT HAS ALWAYS WORKED, WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

In fact, for a thousand years it has been like this.

Unfortunately, the market changed yesterday. One no longer works for the local company, one works for the multinational that has the pieces made for you, your competitor 2000km away, and the overseas company.

The competition is no longer the best price. Today the price is the last of your customer’s problems. Your customer wants certainty, wants a product that demonstrates intrinsically that it is good. It is no longer enough to reassure your customer with a pat on the back.

But let’s return to yesterday’s process.

The process was very simple. Press the cast, a sample check, and deliver your baskets of pieces.

Perhaps you also had robotic deburring systems. The robot carried out its cycle of work, completely disconnected from the rest of the production. You needed to modify the program? Well and good, your specialised operator set about patiently changing the cycle.

You needed to re-equip?

Your specialised operator, with a piece of paper in hand, set about finding the pieces and patiently, screw after screw, changed the caliper and restarted the machine.

You needed to know if a piece had been deburred, or how it had been deburred, or who had changed the cycle of work?

Here you did not have many places to look. You had to speculate.

You wanted to know where the finished pieces were?

So many times you had to say: “they have disappeared”…perhaps it was only a basket hidden behind a thousand others, perhaps the pieces had been mistakenly thrown in the oven, perhaps they hid problems of production…

It always worked well then, where is the problem?

If you do not find countermeasures, your costs rise with respect to your competition, but above all you are not in a position to guarantee a certain production cycle.

Perhaps not today, but tomorrow your best customer will ask you to connect him to your database to see the productivity of the machines and to have a predictive productivity or the waste estimated.

As you customers become more exigent in their requests, the machines are equipped.

With Industry 4.0 all the problems I mention disappear or are reduced to more easily managed problems.

The machine changes in its physiology: the mechanics change, the mounted sensors change, the way of connecting the sensors to the plc, the way of connecting each component to the others.

First of all, the mechanics change, then the electrics (or if you like hardware) and then the software.

There is not a common recipe for all customers, an equal system for all.

Industry 4.0 is above all the integration of the machine with the rest of the factory.

As such, it depends on you, on your company, on your way of working, on how farsighted you are, on how much you want to make the process independent of the operator and controllable in a precise way.

At Metef, we have given out the newsletter that talks about this matter. Additionally I made a video with Delaini Ing. Claudio.

Have a look to this link