1: Industry 4.0 revolution
The ability of human invention has never been as stimulated and free as in this moment of
fourth industrial revolution, where ideas find their materiality as a way of expression in near
real time.
New digital technologies, that are finally available, often at low cost, allow us to design and
manufacture almost everything we imagine, that we would have had and become functional to
improve every area where we apply technology.
We entered the third digital revolution in the world of manufacturing.
Following the first two digital revolution in the world of telecommunications and computing,
today we are taking part to the meeting between digital manufacturing (fabbing), new
approaches to the design, production of goods and open source platforms, which take the form
of new ways of creating assets that compose the environment around us.
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Figure 1- Industry 4.0: How digitization makes the supply chain more efficient, agile, and
customer-focused, Stefan Schrauf, Philipp Berttram, September 7, 2016
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This sparkling, revolutionized digital world, presents numerous unimaginable opportunities
and challenges not only for the industrial design, but also for the Communication Design.
The evolutionary process of technological-manufacturing sector is leading the consumer
towards a new awareness: the ability to be part of the change himself. This is steering
industries towards a new production and distribution model, based on the modulation of goods
and services, which meets the real needs of each customer through a flexible production
structure, interconnected and highly localized.
The modern approach to manufacturing is undergoing a “democratic development” as now,
through the media and the digital network, the intuition of a single individual can become
something concrete, produced at very low cost.
In fact, the concept of Digital Manufacture (or Digital Fabrication, or fabbing), refers
precisely to the process by which you can create solid and three-dimensional objects from
digital designs that are usually available to any user.
The entire system is then expanded via sharing dynamics that allow the diffusion of ideas and
continuous innovations. The word Openness is becoming the key to new and exciting
sustainable developments. Digital manufacturing brings inside a huge and fascinating
revolution, which is the ability to enable potentially anyone to the creation and innovation.
The machines used for digital manufacturing are easy to use and not expensive; these
elements, together with the extreme usability of software for the design and modeling, are
allowing the spread of fabbing also towards unprofessional consumers.
This phenomenon, called “Personal Fabrication”, is also fueled by the emergence of
community in which digital drawings, experiences and creation of digital artefacts are being
shared and made available for free by users.
Another distinctive feature of the fabbing world is that of “rapid prototyping”, which, thanks
to the technological evolution of some ways of production, leads to the “additive
manufacturing”, used for example by the 3D printing (which we will return later).
In addition, “digital manufacture” means also the process that uses CAD data (Computer-
Aided Design) or other types of data to drive an additive manufacturing machine that realizes
assembled parts.
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In addition to the CAD data, which represent the clear majority of the data used in these
processes, for the control of these machines may also be employed other types of data, such as
scan data and data DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine for the
physical representation of medical images in 3D).
With “additive manufacturing”, we refer to the name used to identify the processes that lead to
the construction of an object through the superposition of layers (layer manufacturing).
Opposite processing, respect to milling or laser machining based instead of “subtractive”
processes. The finished products of a company are carried out not more shaping or removing
material, but adding the material, layer by layer.
The elimination of transactions, usually required in conventional methods, as pre and
postproduction lowers costs, time or labour now become superfluous in the manufacturing
process. The additive manufacturing processes, however, work in different ways depending on
the technological needs that arise for the realization of a project.
Whatever the chosen technology, digital manufacturing provides huge advantages over
conventional methods. The most important relate to the acceleration of time-to-market design
cycle, the investment elimination, productions with reduced volumes, the quickest and less
expensive redesign and above all customised parts.
A further advantage is represented by the “green” character of many of additive
manufacturing technologies, which produce less waste of working with respect to milling
processes, does not involve the use of harmful chemicals, do not emit noxious fumes into the
environment and the choice of used materials is very wide (plastic, metal, ceramic or sand).
There are no waste parts to store, because there is no reason to build more units than those that
are required at a given time so there is a reduction of inventory costs and inventory.
The economic impact of this impressive “fourth industrial revolution” is not yet quantifiable,
but the economic models that are emerging around digital fabrication are called “regenerative
economic model”. These models plan to reduce dependence on economic resources by
creating, as a result, new markets, generating a “circular economy” system that increases the
value of the entire industry ecosystem. Currently
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, the Italian Industry 4.0 is worth 1.2 billion
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Data from: Osservatorio Smart Manufacturing PoliMi: “L'Industry 4.0 italiana vale 1,2
miliardi di euro”, 21 giugno 2016.
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euro, but 38% of companies still say they do not know the theme of Smart Manufacturing and
projects are often on a pilot basis with strong differences by sector.
SMEs are almost absent and 62% of digital skills assessment identifies gaps to be filled. In
these years, Italy is developing a national program to guide industries towards the Fourth
Industrial Revolution, which will certainly not ignore, a focus on operator training.
The framework of the Industry 4.0 in our country is basically positive: almost a third of
companies have already started three or more projects based on innovative digital
technologies such as the Industrial Internet of Things, the Cloud Manufacturing, Advanced
Automation, the Industrial Analytics or Advanced Human Machine Interface.
The market value of smart Manufacturing in 2015 in Italy is around 1.2 billion euros, a
significant value that represents just a bit less than 10% of the total industrial investments (10-
12 billion euros).
Over 600 applications were surveyed, the +30% in a year, especially Industrial IoT
technologies and related Industrial Analytics. For 2016 is forecasted a growth rate of 20%,
unfortunately insufficient to recover years behind international technological development
plans.
The 66% of the market is represented by projects of Industrial Internet of Things, it is worth
790 million, followed by Industrial Analytics (23%, 270 million) and Cloud Manufacturing
(10%, 120 million euros).
If we look at the international scene, in addition to a broad growth across all technologies, in
IT’s area the most significant growth concerns applications of Industrial Internet of Things,
+46%, which tows also projects of Industrial Analytics and Cloud. In the area of operational
technologies, there has been a boom of the Advanced Automation with a + 169% thanks to
strong interest in the "collaborative robots".
Very vital is the Additive Manufacturing, especially in certain niche markets like aeronautics,
defense and in the medical field, while it is still being tested in other sectors.
A limit to the spread of Smart Manufacturing in Italy is the poor "digital maturity" in different
industries: although 70% of has already adopted the standard solutions (such as CAD and
production control systems), less than 30% are using more advanced management systems as
Product Lifecycle Management, Computerized Maintenance Management System and
Manufacturing Execution System.
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The identified barriers are many: the environment, cost, lack of infrastructure and innovative
facilities, cultural and organizational boundaries. Businesses are demanding to Government
incentives for the modernisation of networks or for new IT systems (in 50% of cases),
followed by incentives for new machinery for SMEs (46%) and for training to large
companies (38%).
In fact, rarely companies shall carry out an analysis of digital skills (29% of large enterprises
and small to medium 13%), and when performed important gaps emerge, requiring in this way
some corrections in 62% of cases, whereas in 32% only a few figures have the skills and 6%
businesses recognize themselves ready.
With regard to the number of start-ups funded worldwide, Smart Manufacturing grew by 15%,
for the third year in a row (full data to 2014) and the total funding has risen to more than 1.5
billion dollars, of which 39% picked up by new enterprises in the area of Industrial Analytics.
On a list of 173 identified start-ups, the 60% is headquartered in North America and only 30%
in Europe
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.
The United States is the home of innovation, with an average value of funding five times
higher than that observed in Europe (respectively 10 and 2.7 million dollars). Despite this,
there are many interesting cases even in Italy where they were surveyed 20 start-ups (funded
or not) ranging from Industrial IoT ("the Internet of Things" Plug and Play "Alleantia) in
Advanced HMI solutions (Experenti Srl) until the Additive Manufacturing (Kentstrapper). In
Italy, the most fundamental start-ups able to attract financing are in the area of Cloud
Manufacturing.
These data refer to the results of the Observatory's Smart Manufacturing Research of the
School of Management of Politecnico di Milano.
Development and innovation periods need to be shortened, essential factor for success is
becoming the ability and flexibility to innovate and understand the future technology trends to
keep for long time the competitive advantage.
To cope with these continuously evolving conditions, firms need to decentralize and to reach
faster decision-making procedures. That is the reason why; organizational hierarchies need to
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Data from: Osservatorio Smart Manufacturing PoliMi: “L'Industry 4.0 italiana vale 1,2
miliardi di euro”, 21 giugno 2016.
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flatten and supply chains of production (of which more later) should adopt digital solution to
increase their flexibility and ability to satisfy consumers’ needs.
1.1: New professional figures
To create a flexible and responsive digital supply chain firms cannot just gather technologies
and build infrastructures. They must also manage the shift to a completely new culture,
finding people with the right skills, able and willing to carry out the effort. In other words,
they must rework their entire organization starting from the human resources.
- 1.1.1: Chief Innovation Officer
The increasingly important development of Industry 4.0 sees the emergence in the last 10
years of new professions, one of those is the CIO (Chief innovation officer). This figure
created in enterprises of the Anglo-Saxon countries is characterized by an innovative profile,
which embodies a strategist, an IT manager and a market and management of information
systems expert.
Among its many tasks, we can identify the importance of understand and, where possible,
improve and rationalize business processes, knowing the business, enhancing human
resources, defining and managing the budget dedicated to information systems and organize
the management with continuous updating.
The word “Innovation” is not just related to coming up with the best and most original ideas.
Indeed, the success or failure of an innovative idea is often a question of time. That means that
is crucial for a CIO to have a good experience in the market, in order to be able to predict and
see where a specific market might be going, identify possible future product and consumer
needs and finally decide and plan how those needs will be satisfied.
After that, he must be able to communicate in the most efficient way those predictions, in a
way that make sense to the different workers within the organization. They should explain
how they analyzed the gathered data and reached their conclusions mapping out how the
organization might adapt and react too those new changing realities.
All this must be achieved by keeping a "do more with less" profile usually with limited
budgets, for which reason the CIO needs high communication skills and being a resource
optimizer. Therefore, it is not enough to have just a vision.
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A CIO needs to have the power to drive ideas and actions around his vision to make it a
reality. He does not just need to be able to ideate, prototype, and launch a product, he has to
do so in a team environment and in a way, which keeps into consideration each team
member’s individual strengths and skills.
In Italy, this new figure is still not well known, because of the medium-small size of our
industrial structure and the notion that innovation concerns just the scope of research and
development.
Even larger companies seem to be still undecided towards introducing a figure devoted almost
exclusively to the development of innovation. Abroad, as opposed to our country, the manager
of innovation is “catching on”, especially among the big brands such as Coca Cola, Johnson
and Johnson and Procter and Gamble.
This is because, in a context of rapid revolution, managing a complex business, staying
anchored to past business models, is no longer enough. Innovation becomes a top priority for
companies that want to remain competitive, or if you prefer, survive.
Often, however, risk aversion, the inability to have a long-term strategic vision and the
presence of a poorly integrated business structure, make it difficult for business development
and innovation management.
For this reason, it is necessary that companies take awareness of the importance of the Chief
Innovation Officer, a manager with cross-organizational development capacity and powers,
which go to nourish the creation of an integrated environment, innovation friendly and strictly
governing the processes of innovation.
This revolution is not just influencing firms, their human resource organization and processes,
is completely changing the way in which manufacturers and common people think the
production of goods.
That is the reason why we should move our attention, from the influence of innovation on the
closed environment of a company to the opportunities that it offers to the society expanding
the possible technology users.
- 1.1.2: The CISO
With the acronym CISOs we can identity the Chief Innovation Security Officer, a figure that
attends the fundamental roles of handling security technologies (technologist) and defend
enterprise assets (guardian).
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