Few years back we transformed a traditional factory into a smart factory leveraging host of intelligent automation tools. While adopting the automation was much welcomed given the traditional manufacturing landscape of industry 3.0 and earlier, there was always a thought of what next, where can we improvise, what can be done better?
In a race to ensure as much automation and digitalization is brought as possible to stay ahead in the manufacturing world, it was also vital to realize that changes must be adopted at much faster space as they directly impact our brand value, market capitalization.
Fast forward, as we look at our next big leap, transformation ensures that we leverage the concept of connected ecosystem, artificial intelligence and analytics to have smart factories or as famously known the industry 4.0 revolution. While the focus of Industry 5.0 is more collaborative and human centric it’s imperative to understand that 5.0 sits on 4.0 and adoption will help with scalability, stronger and more resilient supply chain and quality benefits.
Begin 2023 and some of the organizations may already be 5.0 enabled with robots on the shop floor or executing laborious tasks. Leveraging cognitive computing techniques with human intelligence in a collective manner is what makes you adopt a digital manufacturing ecosystem.
In this collaborative environment human intelligence and artificial intelligence comes together to offer better sustainability, delivery value to the customer, intelligent decisions, reduction in cost and a more efficient ecosystem. Robots are not the traditional robots from 1990’s who were programmed to execute certain tasks, now we make use of artificial intelligence for robot (called Cobots) to self-sufficiently work hand-in-hand with humans, we leverage IOT (Internet Of Things) and big data to communicate effectively on the supply chain hiccups, progress and resolve blockers.
As we progress on adopting Industry 5.0 organizations may face challenges specially ensuring to understand and effectively communicate that this phase is human-centric and not something which will lead to Cobots replacing human workforce. So how we adopt the change is the key. In addition, factors like ecosystem healthiness in terms of network connectivity, data quality, maintenance, energy management must be considered.
While Industry 5.0 may be a big leap, we need to realize the value of pillar of 5.0 is 4.0 and keep ourselves open to the fact that this may not be the last phase of digital growth next maybe bolstering 5.0 with metaverse, blockchain to have much secure and advanced digital manufacturing landscape.
