Industry 4.0

The Fourth Industrial Revolution,

IR or Industry 4.0 conceptualizes the rapid changes in technology, industries, and social models and processes in the 21st century due to increased connectivity and intelligent automation. The term has been widely used in academic literature and was popularized in 2015 by Klaus Schwab, founder and president of the World Economic Forum. Schwab argues that the changes seen are more than just improvements in efficiency, but represent a fundamental change in industrial capitalism. Part of this phase of industrial change is the integration of technologies such as artificial intelligence, gene editing and advanced robotics, blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds.

Challenges:

Economic:

• High financial costs
• Business model adjustment
• Unclear financial benefits/excessive investments

Social:

• Privacy concerns
• Control and mistrust
• General reluctance to change stakeholders
• Threat of dismissal from company IT department
• Increased risk of attrition in positions that are more professional. tendency to be replaced by artificial intelligence
• Loss of many jobs due to automated processes and IT-based processes, especially for workers

Political:

• Lack of regulation, standards and certification forms
Unclear legal issues and information security

Organizational:

• IT security challenges exacerbated by the inherent need to open previously closed

  manufacturing facilities

• Reliability and stability required for critical machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, including ultra-low and stable latencies
• The need to maintain manufacturing processes
• The need to avoid IT-issues that would cause costly production interruptions
The need to protect industrial knowledge
• Lack of sufficient skills to accelerate the transition fourth industrial revolution
Lack of commitment of top management
• Insufficient qualification of workers