Decide on a direction or die off

Despite the Industry 4.0 theme emerging from Germany early in the last decade, local uptake of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (or smart factories, 4IR or a handful of other near-synonyms) appears to be slow.

The benefits have been spruiked ad nauseum in the intervening years by industrial technology vendors, researchers, manufacturing advocates and others. Yet the barriers, not least of all company size, persist.

John Broadbent, who is Founder and Director at Industry 4.0 consultancy Realise Potential among other roles, estimates that about 85 per cent of Australian manufacturing is carried out on fully-depreciated equipment. He says that a Linkedin poll he ran confirmed the hunch as roughly accurate.

“So we now have islands of equipment that were never meant to be part of an intrinsic integrated network where data could be extracted and shared, both along the internal supply chain and vertically with ERP systems and stuff like that,” he tells us.

Like others in the @AuManufacturing community, Broadbent (pictured) is familiar with the statistics and the need to do better. The contribution of manufacturing value-add to GDP below 6 per cent and falling. Australia’s Economic Complexity Index ranking recently slipping to 105th in the world. And so on and so forth.

The place to start – at both the company and the national level – is a proper strategy.  

“It’s not as expensive as you think, and that then gives you a direction,” says Broadbent. 

“Some wag said when we don’t know where we’re going, any road will do. And I prefer manufacturers to have a direction that they know they need to walk on the next three to five years so that they don’t get put out of business, basically.”

In this episode of @AuManufacturing Conversations, published in partnership with Hannover Messe’s Industrial Transformation Australia event, Broadbent digs a little deeper into what’s needed, explains why a smart factory he helped build in 2011 has only become more productive in the years since, and more.

@AuManufacturing is a media partner to Industrial Transformation Australia 2025. You can find more information about the free event – to be held July 22-24 at  The Dome, Sydney Olympic Park – at this link.

Episode guide

0:56 – An introduction. Approaching a 50th anniversary in the industry.

3:28 – Industrial Transformation Australia and his message on practical transformation and not getting stuck in “pilot purgatory”.

4:15 – Why organisations need bottom-up and top-down buy-in and get to “proof of value”.

6:16 – A lack of understanding from many companies on what Industry 4 is.

7:10 – Poor level of industrial sophistication in Australia.

8:10 – A remarkable number of factories not on a stable network that can mine data in real time, plus an anecdote about inefficient operations at one company.

9:58 – The need for investment and, again, strategy.

Picture: credit John Broadbent/Linkedin