Industry 4.0: How a maturity assessment can strengthen your organization

Within an Industry 4.0 framework, organizations should be able to take advantage of their existing data to help them make key real-time decisions. Sounds simple enough, but it can actually be a long and involved journey to get to a place where an organization is truly optimizing its data.

Industry 4.0 encompasses the advancing trend of automation and data exchange technologies in the manufacturing industry, and introduces new processes and technologies that can be leveraged across multiple functions within an organization.

In the recent webinar, “Industry 4.0: Gauging your enterprise technology and the power of integration,” members of Baker Tilly’s supply chain and manufacturing consulting practice Peter Pearce, principal and practice leader, and Cameron Reid, director, discussed how the maturity levels of organizations can be properly assessed through their business and technology streams as well as what they can do to improve or strengthen those levels.

Industry 4.0 business and technology streams across maturity

When measuring where an organization lands on the Industry 4.0 maturity continuum, Baker Tilly looks at eight functional areas within its business and technology streams.

Software integration: The organization’s core business functionality and technology should communicate and work together, without manual intervention, which is one of the key tenets of Industry 4.0.

Business strategy: Before investing, leadership should look within the context of the organization as to whether certain emerging technologies are pertinent to its business strategy and ongoing operations.

Data management and analysis: This considers not only how an organization is managing and collecting their information, but how it is securing that data as well.

Big Data analytics: Organizations have enormous amounts of valuable information available to them, but how do they mine that to derive timely insights in a way that can help them make appropriate fact-based decisions.

Production technology integration: Organizations should be collecting, mining, storing and sharing the data from the shop floor to substantiate assumptions and improve their decision-making process.

Mobility: Technology allows stakeholders to access real-time information from their manufacturing facility from anywhere and at any time so they can make well-informed decisions with current data.