Stages of industry 4.0

Benefits of Industry 4.0 are numerous, some of them still underestimated, although the phenomena is rapidly reaching all the imaginable sectors and include increased efficiency, safety, precision and even decreased costs.

As the fusion of physical elements and digital technologies, Industry 4.0 is defined by and can be divided into five stages, with the average manufacturer being only at stage one, two or three at the most.

Stage 1: Remote Monitoring

This primary step is reached when a business is able to monitor certain aspects of its operations remotely and has a robust internal process for manually updating all of the necessary data for the parameters to be accessed remotely.

Stage 2: Real-Time Remote Monitoring

Installed sensors and/or IoT devices that gather data for different aspects of the manufacturing, full automated control of the data, but no full advantage of the data continuously collected. Enterprises can use the data they are processing to make profitable predictions, decisions and corrections based on AI.

Stage 3: Real-Time Anomaly Detection

Manufacturers reach stage three when they have been accumulating real-time sensor and IoT device data for at least one full year and have therefore collected enough data to make building business rules around anomaly detection feasible and effective.

Stage 4: Real-Time Predictive Measurement

​A manufacturer has reached stage four when it has gathered sufficient data, invested in structuring it, met the requirements to build accurate predictive models to raise alerts in case of such. This stage is when a company has fully incorporated all of the AI and automation technology.

Stage 5: Real-Time Automated Decisioning System

Smart factory stage is achieved by a business that has multiple AI-driven predictive and forecasting systems in place across their production plants, and the systems have learned and evolved to a point where certain parameters can be changed automatically without human intervention.

What about your company and the stages you are aiming at?
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