Enabling the 4th industrial revolution - "industrie 4.0" or the "internet of things"?

I've been struck recently by the range of people talking about new digital and data developments in manufacturing. Of particular interest has been the apparent explosion of discussion about industrie 4.0 (which is extremely popular in Germany), internet plus (which is being pushed by China) and the industrial internet (being promoted by GE among others).

Managers, consultants, policy makers and academics are all getting very excited about the potential of connected devices. The basic idea is that increasingly things (of all types) will be stuffed with sensors and connected to the internet. They will stream data back to the original equipment manufacturers who in turn will use sophisticated analytics to analyse and interpret the data. There are loads of examples. Caterpillar streams data back from mining and construction equipment, using this both to monitor the health of individual machines and also to identify ways in which productivity and efficiency might be increased. Rolls Royce monitors aero engines in flight, using sensors to track vibrations in fan blades, which allows them to predict whether or not maintenance is required. In the consumer world - wearable devices (e.g. Nike's fitbit or Garmin's forerunner) track and record exercise levels with the data being uploaded to the internet for benchmarking and comparison purposes.

One thing that I find interesting is the rate at which some of these ideas are developing and the level of interest there is in them. A good way of looking at this is to explore Google Trends, which basically tracks the popularity of search terms and plots these over time. Figure 1 shows a comparison of "industrie 4.0" and the "industrial internet". It neatly shows how effective the German Government and large industrial firms (including Bosch and Siemens) have been at promoting their vision of the future - industrie 4.0 - with a rapid rise of interest in industrie 4.0 since 2012.

 

Figure 1: Google Trends - Popularity of Search Terms "Industrie 4.0" and "Industrial Internet".

One could argue that industrie 4.0 is not a new vision. As Figure 1 also shows there has been interest in the industrial internet for at least a decade and indeed my colleagues at Cambridge IfM, most notably in DIAL (the Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory led by Professor Duncan McFarlane) have been getting our students to build demonstrators and simulations of intelligent factories for years. However, the recent excitement is a testament to the growing maturity of the technology and underlying data infrastructures that will enable a wider adoption of industrie 4.0 and this excitement has driven significant Government and policy interest, as well as research and development investment.

So is industrie 4.0 the answer? Are smart factories where materials and machines seamlessly collaborate to drive productivity and efficiency the future? I think the answer is "yes" and "no".  Much of the discussion about industrie 4.0 is still very internally focused - its a factory view of the world. A recent YouTube video illustrates the point. The video talks about a vision of tomorrow - the factory of the future - where machines and materials will use wireless data infrastructures to communicate and coordinate their activities. Yet the examples I started with are ones where the product has left the factory - manufacturers are worrying about how they can track their products once they go out into the field and are used in mines and quarries, on the wings of plans, or in our houses and cars. Here I would argue there is scope for a bigger and more impactful industrial revolution. The fourth industrial revolution will not just be about what happens inside factories, but it will encompass the entire value chain. It will involve remotely monitoring products as they are used in the field. Data will be collected and streamed back to original equipment manufacturers who will use these data to assess the health of assets, to determine whether any maintenance is required, to predict potential product breakdowns and failures. They'll use the data to improve the next generation of design, learning from experience. They'll use the data to look at how the customer's operation might be optimised. By gathering data from multiple machines in a quarry its possible to build a system model of the quarry and identify where bottlenecks lie and hence how productivity can be improved.

This extended view of the fourth industrial revolution won't just be enabled by industrie 4.0, but by the "internet of things" and that's why when you add "internet of things" to the Google Trends data a rather different picture emerges. Its clear that industrie 4.0 and the industrial internet are important component parts, but the real key to driving future success in manufacturing lies beyond the factory walls and this will be enabled by the internet of things.

 

Figure 2: Google Trends - Popularity of Search Terms Including "Internet of Things".

Servitization and Service Innovation in China: Reflections from Shanghai

I’ve just spent a week in China, visiting the Southern China University of Technology (Guangzhou) and Ceibs, the international business school in Shanghai. While at Ceibs I participated in the first seminar on “Servitization and Service Innovation”. Attended by around 100 people, industrial speakers at the seminar included eCoal (an online coal purchasing platform), HP, Sevalo (a construction and mining equipment services business) and SKF. While Professors Marjorie Lyles (Indiana University), Chris Voss (Warwick Business School), Xiande Zhao (Ceibs) and I delivered academic presentations. It was a great trip, fascinating in so many ways, but I thought I might write a short blog about some of the themes that came out for me at the seminar. These include:

1.     The importance of technology to China - all the speakers talked about the way technology is changing China’s approach to business. They talked about all the traditional topics - cloud computing, big data, mobile, the need for better security. But they also talked about internet plus, China’s equivalent to Germany’s industrie 4.0 and the rest of the world’s internet of things. They recognise that as more and more devices are connected to the net, ever greater volumes of data will be created and these data can potentially deliver new and valuable business insights if analysed and interpreted correctly.

2.     Platforms were also a major theme - many of the firms that spoke, including many of those in the audience, were looking to create platforms, often to combine buying power and/or to utilize spare capacity. eCoal, for example, has created a coal buying platform which allows it to drive significant cost savings by pooling purchasing across multiple organisations. HP claimed to be the world’s biggest retailer of paper. With their print on demand services, where you pay per page rather than for the printer, HP is forced to buy large volumes of paper. But with large volumes comes the opportunity to negotiate discounts for bulk purchasing.

3.     One reason so many firms were interested in platforms was the massive success of China’s three stars of eBusiness - Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (the Chinese refer to them as BAT). These three firms dominate China’s discussion of eBusiness and have all successfully created platforms, which in turn create multi-sided markets. Tencent, for example, offers users access to free online games, sells the eyeballs to advertisers, but also sells the players of games equipment upgrades. A dominant question underlying many of the comments at the forum, was how do we create platforms that will allows us to capture multiple, complementary sources of revenue for our businesses.

4.     We also talked about challenges of servitizing - the fact that having a strong product heritage or brand sometimes makes it more difficult to offer services. Interestingly a number of the speakers referred back to the roots of their organisations, obviously product of their firm’s history, but I wondered whether history also constrained their thinking about the future. SKF asked some fantastic questions about servitization. How do we persuade our customers to buy solutions from us before we have proved their value? Who buys services and solutions? Procurement is typically not structured that way. It thinks about products and categories, yet services and solutions often cross multiple products and categories.

5.     And finally we talked about enablers of servitization - what would make the transition to services easier. Through the course of the seminar I heard five key themes: (i) get inside the mind of your customer’s customer. Understand what is value to them, so you can better help your customer create value for their customer; (ii) to understand you need deep relationships - ask yourself are we really close enough to our customers; (iii) seek to balance control and collaboration in the ecosystem - not everyone needs to control or create a ecosystem. Sometimes you have to accept you are part of one and the best you can do is seek to influence it. Think about creating win-win-win across the ecosystem to drive change; (iv) learn from your experience, codify it and share it; and (v) think about solutions - SKF has created solutions factories where they can work with customers to solve their problems. Using your own ideas and technology collaboratively with the customer is a great way of getting inside their minds and building a deep relationship with them.

One of the great privileges of life as an academic is the opportunity to travel, to experience different countries and cultures. I never fail to be inspired when I go somewhere different and meet someone new. My latest trip to China was no exception.