Fourth Revolution of Industries. it Industrial or Digital?

The world is readily embracing the Industry 4.0 concept initially developed by the Germans. With this concept we have made a jump into the subsequent phase of manufacturing i.e. digitization of the industry and internet of things. Because the world is changing fast and so the paradigms and the trends too. With the increasing emerging trend of 'Connectivity', it has now gained a potential insight among the manufacturing domain. Moreover, the inter connectivity and the free data transfer is speedily heading us towards this mega 'Industrial Revolution'. 

Industry 4.0 concept is more than just an eye catchy phrase which enfolds four major trends impacting the revolution in manufacturing industry. This includes increase in data volume, computational analysis, connectivity and digital to physical transfer. In order to, cater the needs arising from these emerging trends has enabled us to create a pavement in artificial intelligence, human machine interaction improving interfacing, and progress in transfer of digital instructions to the physical world. Additionally, these evolving inclinations offers manufacturing industry to connect the digital world to autonomous physical world. 

Analyst have now converged to an idea that the revolution in manufacturing isn't industrial, its digital. There is a huge incoming tide of data volumes but inability to convert this data into an actionable information has rendered most of the data useless. An older saying 'Knowledge is power' has now transformed into 'Data is power'. With this, automation and digitization is now necessity than less of a choice. 

On the contrary, with such increasing pace of advancement the manufacturing challenges still persist in the society even while technology is continually improving. We have failed to address issues that are consistent in the manufacturing industry. Issues such as ensuring quality, customer responsiveness, production capacity and disparate technical systems still remains a challenge. 
All in all, the industry is now on the threshold level of Industrial Revolution 4.0. The revolution promises a confluence of trends and technologies and assures to reshape the things and innovate them in the best possible way. Additionally, Industry 4.0 is now gathering an army of manufacturing sector, this requires careful analysis and monitoring of the strategies exclusively devised to make the most of the new opportunities. 

Organizing data collection ability and driving it to stimulate production is what the 'Industrial Revolution 4.0' is all about.

                                                                               Iqra Pervaiz 

                                                                               BM-060 (2011-2012)

                                                                               Final year (BM-NEDUET)