We often hear about Industry 4.0. But what is this term referred to?
The Industry 4.0 plan aims to promote a new stage of the digitalization of industries that should lead to a growth in productivity and to a cost reduction. With the term Industry 4.0 therefore, we refer to a series of changes in production.
This revolution concerns:
- The use of data that comes from machines as a means to create value. The machines connected to the plant’s system under different levels (from the simple I/O signals to the Ethernet connections) can indeed provide real time information regarding the production cycles’ trends;
- The analysis of the information collected. The control of the so-called “Big Data” can optimize and add value to the already known production processes and discover other ones on which it is worth investing;
- The man-machine relationship, that is how we communicate with machines, tools, interfaces and different languages;
- The bridge between digital and real in production of goods and services. Once we have the data analysed and processed and made them tools able to “educate” machines, last step is to adapt the methods and the tools to produce goods. We refer in this case to robots, interactions between machines etc.
Industry 4.0 is a reality towards which the companies are increasingly getting closer to reach the undeniable benefits of a Smart Factory – an intelligent factory – where technology becomes an enabling element in obtaining an interconnected plant, smarter and more performing thanks to a better collaboration between man and machine.
What does it mean for us to be an Industry 4.0? Fiam’s answer
Industry 4.0 marks the development of a decentralized industry, where processes are controlled and corrected automatically and where the production systems’ performances are intended to improve, in order to take advantage from new technologies and to use them in a more profitable and efficient way. Last but not least, Industry 4.0 is also committed in making processes smarter, by facilitating more and more the use of tools by the end user.
Fiam’s tightening solutions increasingly meet this philosophy and become flexible for these requirements.
All Fiam’s solutions that can connect with the plant’s system are to be intended Industry 4.0. And this doesn’t refer only to tightening automation (i.e. tightening automatic machines or auto feed tightening system MCA) or to high tech DC screwdrivers like the CB and XPAQ (that are in fact solutions already prepared in origin to be connected with the plant’s system), but also to air manual screwdrivers.
Also these can in fact ensure the monitoring and data collection about the tightening process when interfaced, for example, to a TOM (Tightening Operation Monitor) unit.
Those ones, connected to screwdrivers, speed up work performance and control in real time how the tightening process proceeds, eliminating errors, post-process checks and thus generating a gain in terms of time and costs.
Moreover, thanks to these interconnected devices it is possible to program the maintenance of the screwdrivers used following the count of the work cycles performed.
Thanks to the connection and the exchange of data between the TOM monitoring unit and the factory system, each problem is solved before the component arrives at the end of the processing and the results are the optimization of the production process and the reduction of waste.
It is therefore an Industry 4.0 solution that allows companies to be more smart, with more efficient processes and better man-machine collaboration.
Find out more about TOM and how it can interface with the production system: https://tom.fiamgroup.com/en/
