Manufacturing execution systems (MES) are critical elements of Industry 4.0. When all production processes are linked and synchronized with the overall operation, manufacturers have a strategic tool that enables them to improve productivity, streamline costs, boost quality and reduce time to market.
One hundred years ago, a vertically integrated manufacturing complex in Schenectady, NY, defined the company behind the famous blue monogram. Today, the future of General Electric is in San Ramon, CA. That’s the home of GE Digital.
Industry 4.0 technology promises to transform plant floors during the next two decades. It will also change the way that engineers and assemblers interact with machines.
If you can’t see it, you can’t measure it, and if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it! This is the simple mantra of successful manufacturers the world over. Manufacturing excellence can only come from manufacturing visibility.
In the nautical disaster movie, “The Perfect Storm,” three weather fronts converge off the coast of New England to create one of the fiercest storms in U.S. history. A similar convergence is occurring in the manufacturing world today. It’s called Industry 4.0 and it promises to transform the way that engineers design and build products over the next two decades.
FAIRFIELD, CT—Henry Ford was fond of saying that “nothing was particularly hard if you divided it into small jobs.” He followed his own advice, built the world’s first large-scale assembly lines that cranked out millions of Model Ts every year, and left his competitors in the dust. GE engineers are now taking Ford’s advice to the extreme and breaking down the factory into even smaller pieces: bits and bytes.
In the latter part of the 18th century, the advent of water and steam power enabled manufacturers to transition from manual production to mechanized production. Historians know it as the Industrial Revolution, but let’s think of it as “Industry 1.0.”