The digital transformation journey – don’t run before you can walk

23 February, 2021

A journey

Lefeuvre agrees with Phillips-Fern, emphasising that Industry 4.0 is a journey. “You have to achieve the first steps before you can go to the next step and so on,” he said. “You don't have to have the full picture when you start.” Lefeuvre added often the initial customer remit is to digitise what they have done manually, thereby opening the doors to make things more automated rather than relying on manual processes. For Lefeuvre, Industry 4.0 starts here; it doesn't start with big things. It just starts with digitalisation and getting data automatically out of the machines in order to do better reporting. “That's going to be a huge step and you will see results quickly…you don’t need big installations to achieve that,” he said. Then, taking these types of small initial steps can lead to an acceleration of the technology roadmap. Being able to get better more valuable and manageable data from your production processes can potentially enable companies to capitalise on this and generate new ideas going forwards. “You can’t get the full picture straight away; it’s a long process – it’s a journey,” said Lefeuvre.

The importance of stakeholder involvement

McComb agrees, saying that when companies start an IIoT/Industry 4.0 project they don’t always know precisely what they want to achieve. “You might have an idea but if you carry out a small pilot project and you have stakeholder involvement – which is very important – then you can move on to the major project after that and do it in steps,” he said. “Start by taking simple small steps that can give you that knowledge and understanding. Then, you can develop a proper goal and a proper concept of what you want to try to achieve.” McComb added that too many people try to jump in and do it all at once, but the infrastructure is one of the most important things to put in place first.

One of the key takeaways from the panel discussion was ‘don’t run before you can walk’ with IIoT and Industry 4.0’.