Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 5 – Empowered People

Although the degree of automation will increase further, people in the plant will continue to play an important role. Operators will fulfill tasks that cannot be automated – more complex tasks that are often related to decision-making. IT solutions need to provide more support to people with tailored information or recommendations. Typical Industry 4.0 use case examples with people empowered by intelligent IT systems are:

Ad-hoc decision support to manage unforeseen events close to real time. With Industry 4.0, the working environment will change. The degree of automation increases, and operators and supervisors must handle more complex tasks. Unforeseen situations are a challenge, requiring ad hoc decisions in near-real time.

Workforce protection, days without incident. Protecting your workforce is paramount.

By combining IoT-enabled monitoring, geo-fencing, real-time analytics, and integration technology offered by SAP, an intelligent environment, health, and safety system can help prevent incidents by alerting and guiding workers in real time to avoid unsafe areas and tasks in the workplace. Wearable devices can help to inform the worker in any kind of situation. The augmented view becomes a new user experience for providing environmental information to the worker. Supervisors can get real-time awareness of the location and health of employees as well as insight into the environmental conditions around them. They can react in case an employee needs help or guidance.

A leading manufacturer of Flavor & Fragrances protects the workforce with SAP IoT

Dangerous work environments require the monitoring of worker´s health & safety accompanied by real-time visibility for supervisor on safety situation of workers.
There are two kind of sensors that create a network to protect the worker:

• Wearables: SAP Edge Services ensures data processing e.g. if warning message from mobile devices should be forwarded and SAP IoT utilizes rules to determine immutable custom events
• Fixed sensors: data processed directly through Edge gateway and transferred to IoT services

And what are the benefits??

• Improve worker safety
• Management and operational dashboards overseeing all related processes and incidents as well as
• Ensuring compliance at all times

So what are the conclusion of these for Industry 4.0 themes? I will focus on it in my blog post No. 6.

Read all blog posts of this series:

• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 1 – Overview 
• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 2 – Intelligent Product 
• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 3 – Intelligent Factory
• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 4 – Intelligent Assets
• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 5 – Empowered People
• Industry 4.0 for Consumer Products Industry Part 6 – What´s in for you?