Estimad@s Clientes y/o amantes del LEAN:
Engineering.com
tiene como lema “Advanced Manufacturing: The Future of Faster, Better, Cheaper”
En uno de sus recientes artículos, hace una bella reflexión
sobre lo que significa hoy y ahora la Industria 4.0 y las implicaciones que
tendrá en el futuro, no solo en los OEM´s clásicos sino en todos los que están
detrás
Una de las ideas clave de esta revolución de “más rápido,
mejor y más barato” es ser capaces de industrializar con unos lead times mucho
más cortos que los actuales
Para ello, en el artículo consideran vital dominar la
impresión 3D ( a la que dedicaré un post especial, dada su importancia )
Bajo mi humilde punto de vista, intentar tener un Time to
Market corto sin antes haber logrado máxima flexibilidad en los Procesos clave
de Negocio de Fabricación y de Gestión de Pedidos es un brindis al sol, y a lo
único que conducirá es a enormes frustraciones
Por ello, termino este post resaltando una vez más ( perdón
por ser pesado ) que, sí o sí, debemos meter el SMED dentro del corazón de
nuestra estrategia de Negocio: nuestros Cuellos de Botella deben tener poderosos
procesos SMED, no solo organizativos sino técnicos, apoyados por supuesto por
robots/AGV´s, para que el cambio, y por tanto la flexibilidad, no sea nunca más
una restricción a la hora de cumplir los plazos agresivos que nos exigirá la
Industria 4.0
Ahí va, primero el artículo de Engineering.com y después
unos videoclips de Best Practices de SMED
What Is Industry
4.0, Anyway?
“You say
you got a real solution
Well,
you know
We’d all
love to see the plan.”
– The Beatles
The four
industrial revolutions: (1) Mechanization through water and steam power. (2)
Mass production and assembly lines powered by electricity. (3) Computerization
and automation. (4) Smart factories and cyber-physical systems.
If you’ve
been to a trade show or read an op-ed on manufacturing in the past few years,
chances are you’ve seen the terms ‘Industry 4.0’ and ‘fourth industrial
revolution’. Depending on whom you ask, these connote a fundamental shift in
the global manufacturing sector or empty buzzwords dreamt up by marketers and
PR firms. Not surprisingly, the truth lies somewhere in between.
“Are they
buzzwords? Yes. Are they just buzzwords? Absolutely not,” said
Joel Martin, laser tracker product manager for Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence.
Make no
mistake: the manufacturing sector is in the midst of a sea change, though its
final outcome is far from certain. Right now, there are still more
questions than answers:
- What is Industry 4.0?
- What’s the difference between a “smart” factory and a dumb one?
- Is the fourth industrial revolution only for large original
equipment manufacturers (OEMs), or can small or medium-sized enterprises
(SMEs) also benefit?
- How will this affect the skills gap?
And, most
important of all:
- When does the revolution begin?
Engineering.com
sat down with industry experts in an effort to answer these questions and get
their unique perspectives on the next industrial revolution. But first, a
little history.
Exactly
How Many Industrial Revolutions Have We Had?
If you
haven’t been paying much attention to the last century of industrial history,
you might be forgiven for thinking that we’ve only had the one revolution: in the time period between 1760
and 1840. This represents the transition from skilled artisans making goods by
hand to (relatively) unskilled workers using machines powered by a water wheel
or steam engine. The transition was most prevalent in the textile industry, but
the effects of the first industrial revolution were eventually felt in almost
every aspect of daily life.
Machine
works in Chemnitz circa 1868.
That was
Industry 1.0, and we’re on our way to Industry 4.0, so what about versions 2.0
and 3.0?
The second
industrial revolution took place over the end of the 19th century
and beginning of the 20th from about 1870 to 1914 and the
beginning of World War I. Unlike the first industrial revolution, which was
characterized by the advent of new technologies, the second industrial
revolution had more to do with improving existing technologies and the
synergies between them.
For
example, electricity replaced water and steam as the primary power source in
factories. The second industrial revolution also marked the beginning of the
assembly line, interchangeable parts and, with them, mass production.
The third
industrial revolution, like the first, saw the introduction of disruptive new
technologies—in this case, automation and the computer. These advancements
brought about monumental changes to manufacturing, enabling levels of precision
(thanks to industrial robots) and accuracy (thanks to Computer Numerical
Controls (CNCs), never before seen on the shop floor. Pinpointing the time
period for the third industrial revolution is tricky, because—at least on some
accounts—we’re still in it, but the beginning can be traced to the early 1960s,
which saw the introduction of the first industrial robot and first commercial
CNCs.
|
Industrial Revolution
|
Time Period
|
Core Aspects
|
|
1.0
|
1760 – 1840
|
Mechanization
|
|
2.0
|
1870 – 1914
|
Mass Production
|
|
3.0
|
1960 – 20??
|
Computerization
|
|
4.0
|
Now?
|
-
|
What
Is the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
If we take
a broad view of the last three industrial revolutions, a pattern emerges.
Workers
on the first moving assembly line put together magnetos and flywheels for 1913
Ford automobiles.
The
odd-numbered revolutions were the apparent result of disruptive new
technologies, e.g., the steam engine or computer. In contrast, revolution 2.0
had less to do with the invention of new technologies than with enhancing the
synergy between them. If the pattern holds, we should thus expect Industry 4.0
to involve more optimization than invention.
Granted,
this inference is based on a paltry sample size (and we can’t exactly run
simulations or controlled experiments with industrial revolutions), but it does
have some support within the industry, as Jason Urso, CTO for Honeywell Process Solutions, explained:
“We
invented digital control systems 35-40 years ago for the purpose of connecting
tens of thousands of sensors to a digital control system. So, 35 years ago, we
started the journey toward the Industrial Internet of Things [IIoT].
“If I look
at the next major generational shift that occurred, it was probably in the
early 2000s timeframe, with the advent of open systems and more advanced
applications. Building a suite of software on top of existing control systems
allowed us to make even better use of all the data that had been collected in
the control systems from those tens of thousands of sensors and actuators
within the four walls of the plant.
“That
created yet another wave of significant benefits for our industry. I think
we’re now in this next wave, which is often called Industry 4.0, but I see it
as building upon those prior steps.”
Urso is
describing a popular view regarding Industry 4.0 and social/economic
revolutions in general, i.e., they occur gradually over a long period of time.
That’s why you’ll often hear experts reframing the concept of a fourth
industrial revolution in terms of a fourth industrial evolution.
The claim is not that there are no great leaps in manufacturing technology, but
rather that their impact takes time to be felt across the entire sector.
Gordon
Styles, president and CEO of Star Rapid, a provider of rapid prototyping,
rapid tooling and low-volume production services, summed up this point nicely:
“Every now
and again, there’s some fundamental shift that happens, then becomes a trend
and eventually becomes mainstream. That’s how we got to mechanization and mass
production, and now computers and automation. We’re seeing a transition from
having machines with computers in isolation to machines with on-board computers
that are communicating or being controlled from other computers. And it’s not
something that happens overnight—obviously it’s something that has gradually
come about as devices have become more connected.”
John Kawola,
president of Ultimaker, North America agreed with Styles
regarding the incremental nature of industrial revolutions, though he was
cautious of the hype surrounding Industry 4.0:
“I don’t
know if those terms [Industry 4.0 and the fourth industrial revolution] have
meaning. I do think the digital age has moved into manufacturing and is
starting to have a real impact. That’s already happened—whether it’s robotics,
tools, sensors or IOT technology that keeps track of everything in an automated
way.”
Kawola also
suggested an economic explanation for the proliferation of digital technologies
on the shop floor.
“I think
it’s because the cost of technology is coming down,” he said, “whether it’s
software or robots or 3D printing. As costs come down and as materials, surface
finish and the integrity of printed parts start to approach what you can do
using traditional manufacturing methods, more and more 3D printing will be used
for more and more manufacturing. That’s happening now.”
Smart
Factories of Industry 4.0
Picture
this:
The year
is 2048. It’s time for your quarterly on-site visit to the plant. Your
driverless taxi drops you off in front of a large industrial building. You step
inside the factory of the future and see … what?
Artist's
conception of GE's "brilliant" factory, currently under construction
in Welland, Ontario. (Image courtesy of GE.)
The smart
factory, also sometimes called “the factory of the future” is the keystone of
the fourth industrial revolution. Indeed, it’s often represented as the
aggregate of all the Industry 4.0 technologies: cyber-physical systems—physical
assets connected to digital twins—the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT),
data analytics, additive manufacturing and artificial intelligence.
But what
does that actually look like?
How will
the smart factories of Industry 4.0 differ from the “dumb” factories of
Industry 3.0?
“If a
factory is producing a quality product, the processes are tuned, the supplier
channel is correctly monitored and everything is running like a well-oiled
machine,” Martin said. “I think that factory today and the factory of the
future are, quite frankly, going to look very similar.”
This goes
back to the point about Industry 4.0 being more about optimization than
invention, as Martin explained: “The reality is that it’s very seldom for any
factory to work like a well-oiled machine. If you walk into a factory today,
what do you see? A group of engineers huddled around a problem, brainstorming.
‘What is this? How did it happen? What the hell do we do to fix it?’ In the
factory of the future, you’re going to see a computational database spitting
out not just, ‘Hey, you have a quality problem,’ but ‘Hey, here’s the solution
to your problem,’ and, hopefully, in the larger scope of things you don’t even
see it.”
Urso agreed
that optimization is the watchword for Industry 4.0, emphasizing the role that
big data analytics will play.
“If you
think about it in the medical industry,” he explained, “a doctor gets really
skilled by seeing many patients over a long time. That enables them to build a
strong mental model about what symptoms lead to what medical condition. And
that’s what we’re doing: trying to increase the number of patients we’re
seeing.”
However,
rather than increasing instrumentation inside individual facilities, the key is
to improve the interconnections between separate facilities, as Urso explained:
“We have
pretty significant instrumentation already, given the first wave of technology
that was introduced with digital control systems, but the problem was that the
data was always encapsulated within the four walls of a plant. Allowing that
data to come to a central repository—in a cloud environment, for instance—where
it can be shared across many plants is what gives us an advantage. That, to me,
is what Industry 4.0 is all about.”
Returning
to the question of what differentiates smart factories from dumb ones, the
answer on a case-by-base basis seems to be, “Not much.” That’s because the
biggest difference between the dumb factories of today and the smart factories
of tomorrow isn’t what’s inside them, but rather the network that connects
them. As an analogy, consider the difference between having a home
computer and having one connected to the Internet: even if the machines have identical hardware,
the latter is obviously far more powerful.
SMEs
in The Fourth Industrial Revolution
So, if the
smart factory is the centerpiece of Industry 4.0 and the defining
characteristic of a smart factory is its interconnections with other factories,
the logical question to ask is whether the benefits of the fourth industrial
revolution will be reserved only for large enterprises with multiple
facilities.
What about
SMEs?
There are
two answers to this question.
First, it’s
worth noting that even single-facility enterprises can potentially benefit from
the sort of information sharing described above. Consider a simple case: A
shipment from an SME’s cutting tool supplier will be delayed due to severe
weather conditions. That information is relayed to the SME’s manufacturing
execution system (MES), which directs its machining centers to reduce their speed and feed
rates to decrease the chances of too many tools breaking before the shipment
arrives. The point is, even if you only have one factory, you can still benefit
from having that factory digitally connected to the rest of your supply chain.
The second,
and more important answer to the question of whether SMEs will be able to reap
the rewards of Industry 4.0 points to a trickle-down—and sometimes
trickle-up—effect of production technology. Take additive manufacturing, for
example.
“Some of
the early success stories for 3D printing were the ones about low-cost, custom
applications,” Kawola said. “If you’re trying to make a million of the same
thing, you’re not using 3D printing. But, if you’re a lab making dental
appliances and they’re all different, you can print the whole run.”
“That’s
looking at it from one direction,” he continued, “but with costs coming down
and part quality going up, 3D printing is starting to find its way into those
larger-volume applications. GE’s gone all in on this, and they’ve found all
sorts of value in taking an assembly that used to have 16 parts and printing it
in one piece. It took them a couple of years to develop and qualify it—it
probably took the industry a few years to catch up to give them the performance
they needed in terms of the properties of the alloys—but now they’re finding
all these aerospace applications where printing is more cost-effective and you
get better parts.”
We’ve seen
this trend before in previous industrial revolutions. Industrial robots and
CNCs used to be found only in the largest and most sophisticated facilities,
but now they’re a common sight in factories and job shops across the sector.
The reason is obvious: return on investment (ROI).
“If the big
companies get spoken about more frequently, it’s probably because there’s
bigger numbers associated with their savings and outcome opportunities,” Urso
said. “But for smaller locations, the same percentage benefit is possible and,
in fact, some of the technologies that would have been very expensive to deploy
at a small customer’s location can now be deployed using cloud technology and
on a subscription basis that is very closely linked to the outcomes they are
going to generate. So, a small site might be able to take advantage of
technology that previously was only really affordable by a larger customer.”
So, the
answer to question whether SMEs will benefit from Industry 4.0 seems to be,
“Yes,” though with the qualification that they may take some time, if previous
revolutions are any indication. On the other hand, the pace of change in
industrial revolutions does seem to be accelerating: Industry 1.0 arose over a
period of 80 years and Industry 2.0 in a little more than half that time. The
pace of change with automation and CNC in Industry 3.0 should be recent enough
to be obvious. Regardless, one thing is certain: the pace of Industry 4.0 will
be set by SMEs.
New
Developments in Manufacturing
Nothing
defines an industrial revolution better than the technology involved, so it’s
worth considering what to expect from the machinery and software of Industry
4.0. Given the sheer scope of technological change entailed by an industrial
revolution, covering every new development in a single article is impossible.
Instead, let’s focus on two areas in particular: additive manufacturing and the
IIoT.
Additive Manufacturing in Industry 4.0
Bridge
manufacturing using an Ultimaker 3 print farm. (Image courtesy of Ultimaker.)
As a
technology, 3D printing has seen incredible advancement over the past decade,
steadily progressing from prototyping to
production and other
applications. Metal additive
manufacturing is
particularly promising as a production technology, and its efficiency is only improving. As a user
of additive manufacturing, Styles agreed that it’s the developments in this
area that excite him most.
“I’ve been
very excited to see Desktop
Metal’s progress
making metal parts. That’s actually an old technology they’re using—which isn’t
uncommon, companies using technologies that have been around for a while but
overcoming some previous limitation—but in this case they’ve overcome the
problem of shrinkage. Binding of metal powders together to make a pre-sintered
part and then putting it into a sintering oven, where its volume reduces by,
say, 50 percent, which gives you an approximately 30 percent reduction on one
of the axes. This has been going on since the mid ‘90s. These systems have
existed since then, but the reason they’ve never been sold commercially is that
no one could overcome the problem of shrinkage. That’s what Desktop Metal has
done.”
Despite his
enthusiasm, however, Styles was quick to note the limitations of the
technology.
“If you’re
in medical, aerospace or toolmaking, Desktop Metal is not for you. You need
very high densities, on the order of 99.8… or 99.9… The system that I have—Renishaw—as well as EOS and Concept Laser, can provide that. The best Desktop
Metal can do is about 98 percent density, but that’s okay as long as you don’t
need very high-density parts. But that’s a very big market, and I think Desktop
Metal is going to open it up. I predict huge expansion in use of metal 3D
printing over the next few years.”
From the
perspective of a supplier, Kawola noted the advancements that have been made in
3D printing materials in general:
“If you go
back to the earlier days of 3D printing, you had a handful of companies with a
business model that was essentially, ‘Here’s the machine, here’s the software
and here are the materials,’ and the materials were generally closed, i.e.,
proprietary. Obviously that’s a beautiful business model for those companies,
but now, with the next wave of 3D printing companies, which includes Ultimaker
and HP, our strategy is to be more open
with the materials you can use. That’s opened the floodgates for the major
plastics companies of the world to get into this market. As a result, the pace
of development in new materials and the pace of innovation has greatly
increased.”
Once again,
the fourth industrial revolution proves to be more about optimization than
innovation. In the case of additive manufacturing, it’s a matter of improving
production and post-production processes—like heat treatments—and materials, or
more accurately, material selection.
The
Internet of Things in Industry 4.0
The IoT is
a complicated topic, one that warrants a feature of
its own.
Connectivity plays a major role in the fourth industrial revolution, both
within and across its smart factories. Urso offered the following example of
how that might play out:
“We provide
process licenses for large pieces of equipment at refineries and petrochemical
plants that, in essence, run their processes for converting petroleum into
other chemicals. The challenge is always that the technology is optimized when
it is delivered but needs to be operated in a particular way to maintain that
level of optimization over a period of time. It can be challenging for
customers who don’t all have the skills to ensure that those pieces of
equipment are constantly optimized.
“By
connecting that equipment up to Honeywell’s cloud environment, we’re able to
monitor its performance against its nameplate capacity and identify instances
where it’s starting to degrade. More than that, we can very clearly understand
the reason why it’s happening and provide an advisory service to the customer
to make a change.”
This sort
of predictive maintenance enabled via the cloud is exactly the sort of
optimization that comes with the fourth industrial revolution. By taking
production data beyond the four walls of plant, manufacturers will be able to
eliminate unplanned downtime across their facilities and gather insights for
improving efficiencies beyond what’s been previously possible.
The
Skills Gap and Industry 4.0
Despite all
the optimism that comes with the future of manufacturing, there are good
reasons to be concerned, too. Chief among them is the so-called skills gap. According to analyses from
Deloitte, there
will be 3.5 million job openings in manufacturing over the next decade but only
enough skilled labor to fill less than half of them.
With 2
million jobs potentially unfilled, there have been many proposals for
upskilling the workforce in short order. Efforts to attract more
millennials to
take up careers in manufacturing—for example, by using social
media—have met with
some success, but what if the real solution to the skills gap is a technological
one? To be clear:
this isn’t meant to imply the kind of “automation-run-amok” hyperbole that’s
often found in the outsider’s perspective.
“What I don’t think we’re going to
see is robots replacing humans across all of these different industrial
processes,” said Martin. “There’s a dozen different reports from different
institutes and organizations predicting that as artificial intelligence and the
utilization of collaborative robots grows, it will actually increase the
workforce, rather than decrease it. Of course, that will require a different
skillset than what we have today.”
Urso
agreed, emphasizing the role new technologies can play in helping to develop
that skillset:
“I think
the tools we have to educate and empower people today are unparalleled: being
able to provide a field worker with a digital set of procedures that walks them
through the steps they need to perform, being able to use augmented reality to
see how equipment is performing as you’re standing in front of it, using
virtual reality to train on a procedure even 10 minutes before you perform it.
The tools available really are unprecedented and they’re helping us address
that competency gap.”
To return
to the analogy with consumer goods, consider how overwhelming it can be for
someone to switch from a dumb phone to a smart one. The traditional physical
keypad is gone, the simple interface replaced by scores of indecipherable icons
for apps. How are we supposed to figure out how to use this thing if we can’t
even call someone for help? The answer, of course, is in the phone itself: once
you figure out how to google user manuals or pull up YouTube tutorials, you’re
off and running.
So too with
the fourth industrial revolution: the tools for handling it are part of the
revolution itself.
The
Fourth Industrial Revolution
We’ve
answered four of the five questions with which this article began, but there’s
still one lingering:
- When does the revolution begin?
Unfortunately,
if you’re hoping for something like a date to plug into your calendar, you’re
going to be sorely disappointed. It helps to remember that the dates for
previous industrial revolutions are merely approximations—it’s not as though on
Jan. 1, 1760, there was some official declaration that the industrial
revolution had begun. Revolutions on this scale are never so simple.
Rather than
worrying about when Industry 4.0 begins, consider asking yourself a different
question:
- If the fourth industrial revolution begins tomorrow, will I be
ready?
For more
information on Industry 4.0, check out our feature-length articles on augmented
reality, the Industrial
Internet of Things and metal additive
manufacturing.
Hasta aquí este excelente artículo de Engineering.com,
sacado del link:
El resto de este post lo dedico a documentar buenas Best
Practices que he encontrado en Internet sobre poderosos SMED, no solo
organizativos sino técnicos, apoyados en robots/AGV´s
DIE
CART LOADER - DIE UNLOADING PROCESS
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Shanley Enterprises - Quick Die Change
Pressautomation - KUKA WaveLine (2012)
ABB’s
state-of-the-art technology for hot stamping:
SMED em uma Injetora
54 second One Way Mold Change
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Como siempre, he incluido estas reflexiones en mi blog
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Un cordial saludo
Alvaro Ballesteros
