What an event it was ! Critical Manufacturing organized on outstanding event – and I hope there will be a second one not too far in the future. About 500 experts met in Porto to discuss digitization and Industry 4.0 efforts. To me it was mind-blowing how much is going on in this area.
A key observation I had over the whole 2 days: There are big differences in how much progress different industries and companies have made so far.
One of the bigger challenges discussed multiple times is: How to calculate a realistic ROI for all the upfront cost to achieve a full digitization of a company or is this just a basic business enabler for future success ?
A first step to this journey is to understand where does your company stand today ?
I found this particular table from Jan Snoeij’s presentation very interesting to assess what manufacturing maturity level a company may have reached (1. being the lowest, 5. being the highest).
It is impossible to blog about all the great presentations and talks during the 2 days, but here are some of my favorites:
Jeff Winter Keynote: Transforming Manufacturing with Industry 4.0 – runtime about 38 minutes
Nicholas Leeder, The Smart Industry Readiness Index – runtime about about 30 minutes
Didier Chavet: The Role of AI in Manufacturing: Use Cases from the SEMI industry – runtime about 25 minutes
Francisco Almada Lobo: Stairway to Industry 4.0: a journey through hype and reality – runtime about 33 minutes
I had the honor to moderate a panel discussion on the topic of “Role of MES and IIoT in building resilient and data-driven enterprise” – runtime about 60 minutes
All presentations and recordings from the summit are available here: LINK
Factory Physics and Automation blog 