Raising quality standards with the 4.0 Industrial Revolution

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Technological progress has now spawned an era of digital transformation. The transformation was brought about through digitisation as analogue information was converted to digital data. The increase in digital data has therefore enabled digitalisation, wherein technology is utilised to shape businesses and industries, says Yash Mehta. This phenomenon is now having a profound impact on the manufacturing sector and is labelled as the Industry 4.0, widely known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The Industry 4.0 is about bringing optimisation, efficiency and quality to the processes by incorporating intelligent cyber-physical systems. The Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud Computing and Big Data Analytics are some of the technologies that are pushing forward this revolution. KPMG has estimated that the component market of Industry 4.0 could be worth over US$4 trillion (€3.44 trillion) by 2020.

Quality control and management form one of the primary focus areas of Industry 4.0. Quality dictates the profitability of any product and even more emphatically in the current global scenario.

Today, people are increasingly becoming quality conscious and they don’t mind paying more for better quality and sustainable goods. This is particularly a pain point for industries because products are getting more and more complicated, especially in terms of the manufacturing aspect.

Besides, consumers expect agile and seamless purchase experience and delivery, as a result, manufacturers are facing the pressure to cut short the lead times in production in order to reduce time-to-market for products.

In a survey of executives, it was found that they ranked time-to-market as the greatest challenge in quality management followed by product complexity, globalisation and regulatory changes. Thus, quality improvement and monitoring are identified to be among the top industry 4.0 use cases.

Quality 4.0 has henceforth emerged as a term to signify the emphasis placed on quality in the era of Industry 4.0. It does not refer to a technology; rather, Quality 4.0 alludes to the improvement in the quality standards of production processes and products through Industry 4.0. This is done by improving the existing traditional quality management process, not by replacing them. The strategy has incentivised startups to provide solutions that address the quality demand.

Seebo is one such startup that looks to provide a SaaS platform for Quality 4.0 with predictive analytics. By creating a digital model of the manufacturing process, including quality control procedures, and then applying AI to the model and its real-time data, Seebo’s platform is able to generate a Predictive Quality Digital Twin, highlighting potential quality failures and their root causes.

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