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. 

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.

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.  

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.

Imagine for a moment that you’re at an antiques auction. You’ve scoped out a handful of items that might meet your needs, and you have a strong but flexible sense of how much money you would be willing to spend on any given item. But when the first of your lots is on the auction block, instead of sitting in the auction house, you’re situated at a remote location, watching a live video feed of the proceedings. When you want to place a bid, you have to instruct your representative at the auction house to raise her paddle. Naturally, by the time you’ve done this, the price that you’re acting on is already out of date. As a result, you wind up with none of the items you had hoped for, even in cases where you might have been willing to spend more on them than the price that they ultimately went for. 

Imagine you’re living in a smart home. One evening after work you decide to drive to the grocery store to pick up snacks and drinks for an upcoming party that you’re hosting. When you take the road to the market rather than your usual route home, your car sends a notification to the appliances awaiting you at your house. The refrigerator, sensing that you’re low on milk, sends a reminder to your phone to pick some more up. Your dishwasher, tracking your detergent usage over time, estimates that you will run out before you next go shopping, because you usually wait at least a week between trips. Lastly, your car sends a text alert to your spouse, who might remind you of your guests' snack food preferences or other salient details.

Imagine for a moment that you’re planning a camping trip with your friends. There are several of you, and the trip will last a few days, meaning that you’re going to have to take two cars and considerable volume of supplies. How do you decide how each car will be filled? Let’s say your friend already has tent poles and fire starting material, so it might fall to you to procure and transport sleeping bags and food supplies. If one car is more fuel efficient than the other, does that change your plans? How will you go about choosing the right route to your destination in order to find the right balance between toll roads and potentially less direct pathways? 

Industry 4.0 is already radically changing the global manufacturing landscape; so much so that Deloitte estimated that as many as half of the S&P 500 firms would be replaced by 2027 due to digital disruptions. Prognostications like this lend a sense of urgency to discussions of the adoption of Industry 4.0 principals like interoperability and cyber-physical integration. What many forget, however, is that it’s not technology alone that determines a company’s long-term staying power. Rather, it’s the customers who ultimately determine the success or failure of a given business. 

Additive manufacturing (AM), otherwise referred to as 3D printing, has long been one of those technologies that seems to be just beyond our grasp. By many accounts, this will soon cease to be the case. Gartner estimates that by 2021, 20% of the world’s top consumer goods manufacturers will use 3D printing to produce custom products. Some businesses are already establishing internal start-ups with the intention of refining 3D printing techniques and best practices, and as the process gains speed and production quality it will soon become a viable method for mass production and a disruptive force across the manufacturing sector.