Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0

The concepts defining Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0, which are synonymous, date back to at least 2006 and then evolved rapidly through 2011 when a handful of technological evolutions converged with sufficient maturity to transform manufacturing in revolutionary ways. Today, Industry 4.0 is not only a common term in the industry but is typically well understood by business technology leaders as part of the lexicon throughout C-Suites of most manufacturing companies. Industry 4.0 became ubiquitous even as individual technologies and integration of those technologies still evolving rapidly. At Raytheon Intelligence & Space, this adoption is exemplified by the establishment of corporate operations organization explicitly named Industry 4.0. 

In the U.S., national public-private partnership organizations, such as CESMII (Clean Energy National Smart Manufacturing Institute), ARM (Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing), and MxD, representing Digital Manufacturing & Design, have been working to ‘democratize’ cyber-physical automated systems for industry, and substantially reduce their time to value for use in manufacturing small and medium business and large companies alike. Relative to ‘cyber-physical’, cyber is the digital domain (data, controls, models, etc.) and the physical directly manipulate the material world to realize manufactured products. RI&S has been involved in this technological revolution since the beginning, and we have learned much over the years by ‘doing’, and implementing lessons learned from that doing. 

To make progress with Smart Manufacturing, it’s critical to ‘learn by doing’. For example, simple process automation with digital data capture that reduces support labor by 50 percent, or controls and data acquisition applied to a small handful of devices. Early pilots inform the business of value (or lack thereof) and provide experience across technical, business, and operational functions. An example from one of our sites included two pilots— 

 • a light-guide projector used in a logistics application, and 

 • a novel combination of digital tools to make workstations ‘smart’. After implementation, the logistics pilot value wasn’t being realized, and it was stopped – we learned about future use cases. The second was wildly successful, and it was replicated and matured. Long-term, non-value-added manual transactions in that factory were reduced by approximately 70 percent. Another example we’re implementing is the reduction of repetitive touch operations for a world-class, complex aerospace and defense subsystem by approximately 50 percent – which includes approximately 20,000 assembly operations and a digital collection of >70,000 key product characteristics. This drew on key lessons learned on three ‘first-ever’ cyber-physical automation systems dating back six years. They provided the foundations of personnel, organizational, digital, and business expertise required for such a complex project. This is Industry 4.0. Looking to the future, there are already academic research publications, Eurozone strategic narratives, and popular business articles touting the coming of Industry 5.0 – with the majority of publications defining Industry 5.0 as the philanthropic evolution of Industry 4.0 to be more human-centric, sustainable, and beneficial to society. To be sure, this is the direction we should be headed. However, I do not believe we need to wait for Industry 5.0 to put people at the center of our technology’s purpose. In many of my internal RI&S and external industry presentations, I have a slide titled ‘The Factory Operator: The Center of the Manufacturing Universe’ to introduce the topic of technology's intersection with the human experience.

“Today, Industry 4.0 is not only a common term in the industry but is typically well understood by business technology leaders as part of the lexicon throughout C-Suites of most manufacturing companies.”

One key aspect required for success in aerospace and defense will be the ability to look back upstream into the engineering design process, including people skillsets, manufacturing inclusion in R&D, and manufacturing technology, with the use of digital engineering processes integrated with Industry 4.0. The ability to harness Smart Manufacturing to improve the performance and affordability of products, especially in small-lot builds with rapid ‘block’ changes, will hinge on the ability to integrate the processes of ‘product design’ and ‘manufacturing design’. This will go beyond traditional Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) – it will be concurrent ‘digital engineering’ with both ‘product-floating-in-space’ DFMA and design of factory interface to product, thinking about both physical and cyber automation. This is required to compete in the global market and national security landscape. Successful ventures will have alignment on this concept from the customer through the design and production authority in the contracted supply base. Of course, this is easier said than done.

There are myriad complexities in this new world of rapid development, customization, and cyber-physical automation systems. But I’m optimistic about our ability to traverse Industry 4.0 and achieve the required business and customer value, and in parallel not wait for Industry 5.0 to achieve the goals of societal benefit, sustainability, and human-centric manufacturing technology.