The impact of industry 4.0 with IoT to manufacturing Asia

Nowadays everybody talks about Industrie 4.0 and Internet of Things (IoT). However, less and less person understand the origins of these great concepts. Many small details are emphasized and the great picture was lost. He/she can understand the strategies of Asia countries (mainly China) responses and plan their owned strategies, if the basic concepts can be captured.

[What is industrie 4.0?]

The industrie 4.0 cannot go alone without IoT. The idea of the industrie 4.0 (+IoT) is that: for the designers without the manufacturing capabilities, he/she can submit their designs via internet to a server. The server would link all the manufacturing capabilities around the world and accomplish the 3 things: (1) Design Rule Check, (2) Cost (Price) estimation and (3) the Delivery Time, all done automatically. Once all 3 pass the designer's criterion, the product can be made via the connection of IoT. Industrie 4.0 is talking about many customized designs with small production volume.

Industrie 4.0, like all industrialization, are talking about the total volume. The difference is that, industrie 4.0 is referring to much more designers than the other ones, because nowadays almost everybody can make their owned designs, with the help of computer aided design tools.

[Background]

Industrie 4.0 starts with Germany, which is a great invention to all Europe. Starting from Millennium, Europe worries about the manufacturing capabilities move to Asia. It starts from the East-South Asia and gradually move to China. It was good at one hand because European can have products with lower price. It was danger at another hand because all advanced technologies were leaving Europe.

Europe made one success move against this situation by developing equipment companies based on the solid material knowledge in Europe. Many successful examples, such as ASML in semiconductor lithography equipment, Philips/Siemens for medical equipment, European automotive industries, etc.

In the last decades, China launches many material researches and developments with huge funding. They started to make their owned equipment. To make things even worst, there is very few key materials supply from western Europe. The topic of "Material scarcity" was mentioned years and years.

What is the breakthrough of the Europe's advanced manufacturing? That was a key question for many years, especially the key industrialized countries, where Germany is one of them.

Thanks to the industrie 4.0, the capability of the advanced equipment industries can be output to all over the world. Moreover, the power of Europe design can be boosted by the help of global (customized) manufacturing by IoT.

[Manufacturing Asia’s response]

The manufacturing capability of Asia is excellent after world war II. Nowadays, the rising China even works as the world factory, because of the huge material, and energy storage, cheap labour (with good technical skills), excellent transportation facilities and supporting policies. We deduce the strategies of China regarding the Industrie 4.0 based on many facts, as 4 key points:

• (1) China welcomes Industrie 4.0 because this can exhibit China's capability of manufacturing and transportation facilities,

• (2) China is almost ready for Industrie 4.0 because China has worldwide the largest IoT (Alibaba, taobao, etc.) and the experience to manage it,

• (3) For the automation production equipment (robots), China can make themselves or acquire the key companies (most of them are rather small), together with their know-hows. For the automation process designs, many well-trained engineers from Japan, Korea and Taiwan are applicable,

• (4) The one that China is working on is the material technologies.

In the very short notice, China will be ready to launch Industrie 4.0 (Chinese version). Are you ready?