Page 20 - MetalForming July 2016

Heating Up: the Cyber Age of
Automation, Controls
18
MetalForming/July 2016
www.metalformingmagazine.com
The brains behind our machinery have evolved to Industry 4.0, with today’s most pressing task: Figure out what to do with so much data.
By LOUIS A. KREN, SENIOR EDITOR
Ours is a world where informa- acceleration of automation in the
tion is available everywhere, all
the time, for our perusal. But what do we do with it? Within industrial settings, and in metalforming opera- tions to be specific, we are in an age where controls and monitoring com- ponents gather and sift through more production data than ever before. What can be done with all of it? A lot. But just what to use and how to use it forms the cornerstone of what’s been coined as Industry 4.0.
To recap in a long-term view, Industry 1.0 refers to the use of steam power that spawned the Industrial Revolution. With the incorporation of electricity, industry was able to more efficiently harness power and operate around the clock. This development ushered in Industry 2.0. Then, Industry 3.0 described the adoption of technology and automation.
A near-term view sees Industry 1.0 as a parallel to lean manufacturing in the 1970s; Industry 2.0 as outsourcing in the ’90s; and Industry 3.0 as the
2000s. Today we’re ushering in Industry 4.0, whose ideal definition has been suggested by analysts at McKinsey & Company, a research and consulting firm:
“...the next phase in the digitization of the manufacturing sector, driven by four disruptions: the astonishing rise in data volumes, computational power and connectivity, especially new low- power wide-area networks; the emer- gence of analytics and business-intel- ligence capabilities; new forms of human-machine interaction such as touch interfaces and augmented-reality systems; and improvements in trans- ferring digital instructions to the phys- ical world.”
To assess how Industry 4.0 is affect- ing our industry, MetalForming spoke with Mark Heitbrink, electrical engi- neering manager at Nidec Minster, Minster, OH. The press builder increas- ingly has incorporated advanced automation and control technologies