The ‘digital age’ is undoubtedly creating many opportunities for established businesses but many companies still struggle to harness the power on Industry 4.0 technologies and to build future-oriented factories.
How to bUild the “Phygital Factory”
GELLIFY, as digital trasformation leader, has created a framework for building the “Phygital Factory” to help business leaders that are facing challenges such as: rethink internal processes, speed-up production while coping with more demanding consumers and rapidly changing competitive environments.
This framework is made of these pillars:
- smart manufacturing
- human-machine collaboration
- evolutionary computation
- new digital-driven business models
Companies can future-proof their capabilities and keep thriving in the new normal using frameworks such as the one developed by GELLIFY. The key premise is that “companies need to be aware that the digital transformation is not a short trip from one place to another: digital trasformation it’s a journey, and a never-ending one.”
Then, what are the concrete steps that companies can take to move forward in their paths towards fully phygital factories?
01
MAKE AUTOMATION SMART
Automation of dull and repetitive processes, for instance, is a critical leverage that companies can exploit to speed up operations.
Such investments, however, should not be made under the premise that increasing automation across all areas automatically leads to an increase in productivity: investments in automation should be smart – that is, automation should be used only where it makes sense to do so.
How should we develop, then, a robotic solution?
02
DO NOT FORGET HUMAN FACTOR
In the case of Industry 4.0, workers can feel threatened by technologies that might disrupt their traditional ways of working, and even fear that such technologies will eventually replace their work. It is thus critical for companies to design their digitalization initiatives in ways that do not substitute human, but empower people and enable them to work faster and better.
How should we reach the so-called flexibility and scalability for the operational excellence?
03
ALLOW FOR CROSS-FERTILIZATION
One of the most important things in digital transformation is cross-industry contamination; this means that what applies to an industry can also apply to others. Putting oneself in the customer’s shoes, for instance, can reveal important opportunities for changes in industrial environments.
How does it happen that solutions developed in specific sectors can turn incredibly valuable across industry boundaries? And these solutions turn to be critical enablers of successful innovation strategies..
04
IMAGINE NEW SCENARIOS
The incredible amount of data people and organizations companies generate every day is an invaluable asset when it comes to strategizing and decision-making. Technologies such as advanced analytics tools or digital twins can enable business leaders to monitor the performance of machines, processes, and other operations in real-time, define critical parameters, and proper action plans for operational excellence.
Those same data can be used to solve problems that humans alone would not be able to solve without huge amounts of hours and efforts – and most often, in sub-optimal ways. How?
DATA IS THE FUEL
There is no digital transformation or revolution without involving a bit quantity of data. Data is the fuel of industrial internet of things, and it is the fuel of the intelligence that we can build around these data.
This kind of technologies – called evolutionary computation, or memetic computing – can be used to support decision-making within companies in several different areas, spanning from logistics and computation of the best routes, to production scheduling and workforce management, as well as the design of components. How?
