For Industry 4.0, business case development and technical considerations are clearly important but maybe market catalyzation will come from leaps of faith
Uptake of industrial 5G solutions has been a bit of a mixed bag. While the vision of Industry 4.0 hasn’t yet been relegated to our memories, it also hasn’t taken off as quickly as many, particularly those selling the tech, have hoped. There’s a few reasons why but the high level is that the solution landscape is fragmented, the buyers are often quite conservative, it’s expensive, not incredibly scalable and the ROI can be tough to parse. All that said, there are pioneers in the space ready to lean into digital transformation, there are practitioners ready to help design and deploy the right systems, and there are pragmatists able to balance tech for the sake of tech with replicable business models and use cases. All of which are positives.
During the recent Industrial 5G Forum (available on demand here), RCR Wireless News convened a panel of experts on the buy side, the sell side and the ecosystem side to talk through the why and how of industrial 5G, and provide practical advice on what it’ll take to transition from a vision of Industry 4.0 to a new reality of efficiency across high value vertical sectors.
Arcelik Global Executive Director of Innovation Pinar Kose Kulacz called out the need for mobility and for a unified access medium to support a wide range of device types as driving her firm’s interest in 5G. Headquartered in Turkey, Arcelik manufacturers a wide range of home appliances that it sells globally. Kulacz discussed Arcelik’s interest in 5G as a long-term enabler of its “factory of the future” ambitions.
She continued: “We want to be pioneers,” and use 5G to enable mobility and automation. “We have mobile devices on the shop floor, we have automatic guided vehicles, handheld devices, and they all have to be connected. They have to be moving around. We can’t afford coverage issues…We believe [the] factory of the future is going to be a lot more flexible. We are a B2C business, so we have to deliver what the consumers and want and so flexibility is key. Even though it’s costly…in the future, only the walls of the factories will be fixed. So any station on the shop floor, in discrete manufacturing, will get to move around. And when you start moving them around, you have to do it in the most affordable way possible, preferably without moving wires around.”
Allen Roberts is a senior solutions consultant with AT&T’s 5G and Private Cellular Center of Excellence, a group within the carrier’s organization that works with enterprise customers to design, deploy and manage private networks. The point Roberts hammered home during the discussion was that even in cases where businesses have invested in workflow digitization, they’re still often hindered by a lack of connectivity. This issue, he said, needs to be addressed in the context of a deep understanding of specific workflows, particularly workflows that involve some aspect of mobility.
“Quite candidly, if you really go out and observe the workflows, especially for ones that are moving, they still have lots of what I call dark spaces throughout these campuses, where there still isn’t any wireless connectivity, and/or it doesn’t perform well, and that’s a result of the organization not being able to meet their objectives to their fullest potential, right?” he said. “Many of them, these organizations have invested into hardware and software to digitize the workflow, moving away from paper and pencil, but they’re still hindered by a lack of connectivity in all of the areas where the workflow is actually happening.”
Further to that point: “We talk a lot about how do I get the information to where the workflow is actually happening, versus the workflow having to adapt to go get information. And so I think those are big drivers for organizations to take that next step. We think about site type, user type, and use case. We think about the throughput of the workflow, the quality, safety, all the way to employee engagement and morale, and ultimately cost and how we can improve all of the above. And I would tell you the largest set of processes and/or use cases that we’ve seen, and that we’ve deployed and are currently working on, is still very much connecting the worker and trying to reduce wasted time and inefficient steps. How do we drive more levels of productivity? How do I get more output with the same amount of input, and/or even less. By getting them access to real-time information in places they still don’t have that to make better informed decisions, to reduce human error of waiting to input information when they can get back to where they actually have reliable connectivity, more quality in that data is captured.”
West Midlands 5G, based in an industrialized area of the United Kingdom, is an organization designed to “help individuals and organizations identify the right digital innovations to unleash their full potential,” and a big part of that, as the group’s name states, is cellular connectivity.
The group’s Managing Director Robert Franks, drawing on the many projects West Midlands 5G has been involved in, observed that simply swapping out Wi-Fi or Ethernet for 5G “isn’t enough. It’s those new use cases on top of that, and depending on the manufacturer and where they’re at, we’re seeing really strong potential around things like all sorts of business automation, things like quality monitoring and improvements.” Additional value-add use cases, he said, include predictive maintenance, remote monitoring and asset tracking. “But I think, really, the opportunity is finding the right mix of those use cases to power the business case because obviously the case for deploying any network or any centralized infrastructure is normally quite high, whether it’s capex or opex.”
Franks encouraged not just conducting a cost/benefit analysis in developing an ROI profile, but also consideration of establishing and measuring KPIs throughout. He also pointed out how utterly different all of this business logic when comparing a brownfield environment to a greenfield implementation. He gave the example of automakers, in the push to electrification, standing up all new factories. “It’s radically cheaper if you make networks and other technology part of your greenfield development. The cost savings are huge compared to doing it in a brownfield environment. In a brownfield environment, it’s obviously harder because you’ve got established infrastructure that you are seeking to influence.”
Kulacz took that notion head-on, hearkening back to her description of Arcelik as a “pioneer” in the space. The idea wasn’t a “one-time cost optimization,” she said. “We looked at it more holistically…We have 31 plants around the world and none of them are identical…They’re not the same age, they don’t look the same, they don’t function the same. So we have some commonalities…but the KPIs aren’t the same.”
She continued: “In our case, return on investment was important, but it was not the primary objective…We identified a set of use cases we believe are going to contribute to reaching that ROI objective that we have…So, yeah, I think ROI is a concern, but to start I think you need to take a little bit of a chance.”
The point is, maybe, you can fill all the factories in the world with practitioners and pragmatists, but if not for the pioneers–those willing to blaze a new trail and try to do something better—visions stay visions. Without pioneers drawing up the map and sharing lessons learned, scale will always be just out of reach, costs will always make the buyer cock their head, and efficiencies will sit in the desk drawer underneath the clipboard.
