One of the most crucial facets of the Industry 4.0 revolution is the integration of more robust data analytics into industrial processes. The idea is that by utilizing data in a thoughtful manner driven by specific business goals, businesses will be able to gain new insights into their workflows and potentially add value. As businesses have begun to adopt this mindset the results have frequently been promising—but why should data be relegated to complex analytics processes? In the spirit of turning data into insights, here are six important statistics about Industry 4.0 to consider as you navigate the complexity of the modern supply chain. 

There’s no denying it: the pace of the global supply chain is getting quicker every day. Broad increases in connectivity have led to equally broad increases in customer expectations, meaning that when things inevitably diverge from expectations, it’s imperative that supply chain managers react swiftly and decisively. This growing need for lightning fast response times comes with increased pressure to build a value stream that is visible and connected enough to provide planners with the information that they need about existing operational plans and potential plan b’s—including inventory levels, transport routing information, and delivery requirements.

Imagine for a second that you’re an NFL quarterback: you have a plan to throw a forward pass to one of your wide receivers, to whom you’ve dictated a specific pass route. Unfortunately, you’ve neglected to inform any of your other teammates of what you plan to do. Even worse, you haven’t bothered to ask any of your fellow players if they have plans of their own and, if so, how they might conflict with the plan you’ve devised. As a result, when something goes awry, none of your teammates are able to make adjustments on the fly, and your plan has no way of overcoming whatever hurdles crop up. 

Though the industrial revolution was nominally about the introduction of steam powered machinery into factory production, its long-term effects are almost impossible to overstate. What began as an ingenious change to the inner workings of factories became a catalyst for widespread social and political change, arguably leading to the formation of modern capitalism and paving the way for a fundamental redefinition of people’s relationships to labor, their environments, and each other. Though the so-called second and third industrial revolutions were not quite as earth-shattering, they did stimulate the global spread of electricity and the internet, two technologies without which the modern world would be virtually unrecognizable.

In February of 2018, popular fast food brand KFC was in the midst of making some big changes to its UK supply chain. They were in the process of switching from Bidvest Logistics to DHL as their primary distributor, while simultaneously streamlining their warehouse system from six facilities serving the country to only one. Anyone who keeps current with supply chain management likely knows what happened next: the restaurant was forced to temporarily close more than 700 of its 900 locations in Great Britain. The reason? Chicken supplies were not reaching the stores. 

Discussions around the effects of climate change have been among the dominant topics of conversation in the first two decades of the 21^st century. As global leaders in government and business consider what steps must be taken in order to ensure the health of our natural resources and ecosystems, businesses can almost certainly expect changes to the way that supply chains operate. Many within the worlds of manufacturing and shipping are beginning to track their carbon footprints and overall environmental impacts, but still others are unsure of the potential considerations involved. If you’re in the latter camp, we hope that these four facts will help give you a grounding in conversations around green footprint optimization.  

Imagine you’re a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Every morning, you check the prices of the stocks that you’re interested in, and you act on those numbers, not checking them again until the end of the day. Your competition, on the other hand, is using real-time information to inform their trading decisions. Which technique seems more likely to yield a profitable trading strategy? Your knee-jerk reaction is probably that you’re going to lose money virtually every day, because your competition has a more accurate picture of the real financial landscape while you’re using information that’s obsolete virtually as soon as you set foot on the trading floor. 

Just as the modern factory is adding new, intelligent technologies in order to create connected, interoperable workflows, the modern supply chain is rapidly becoming smarter, more networked, and more technologically advanced. Though the so-called fourth industrial revolution gets most of the attention, there is another revolution occurring simultaneously within the world of logistics, and it’s changing the way that products make their way from production facilities to customers. In the spirit of Industry 4.0, some have taken to referring to this new logistics paradigm as Logistics 4.0—but what exactly does this term mean?

The rise of Industry 4.0 is already impacting the way that supply chain managers do business. As it continues to promote digitization and interoperability across all touchpoints on the global value chain, it will no doubt bring about significant changes across a variety of different supply stream operations. No doubt one of the most significantly impacted processes will be transport logistics, which might lead one to wonder, “what will transport logistics look like in the Industry 4.0 era?”

Industry 4.0, also known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, has been hailed as the underpinning of the modern smart factory, promoting the rise of cyber-physical systems, increased machine-to-machine communication, and decentralized decision-making within production processes. The concepts that make up the Industry 4.0 framework have been suitably revolutionary, and they're rapidly changing the way that manufacturing businesses operate, but many organizations are realizing that this framework doesn’t have to stop at the edge of the factory floor. Indeed, the very same principles that drive modern, digitized manufacturing are also bringing about the era of Logistics 4.0.