The concept of industry 4.0 in Germany, the industrial Internet in the United States, and “made in China 2025″ in China It pushes the global vision to “intelligence”. What we can see is that the global wave of intelligence has come, only the differences of “waves” in different countries and fields. Printing industry, together with the international exchange working committee of China printing and equipment industry association, specially invited Andrea briganti, general manager of the Italian printing, paper processing and Papermaking Equipment Manufacturers Association (ACIMGA) to share with us the “spray” it saw.
Andrea Briganti
General manager, ACIMGA, Italy
The transition to intelligence is known as industry 4.0 in Europe. In recent years, focusing on this theme, the Federation of Italian industry and the Ministry of economic development have carried out a number of work, and issued a series of special projects and measures to encourage enterprises to buy equipment in line with the new production mode. Today, connectivity, big data analysis and remote control have become inherent features of Italian manufacturing technology and mechanical production.
In the Italian printing industry, intelligent manufacturing has been further developed and gradually integrated into the development of the whole supply chain. The Federation of paper and printing of Italy (Federazione Carta e grafica) has been leading a new project since 2018, which aims to train enterprises to have different cultural perspectives and prepare for the 4.0 transformation of enterprises. Now, it’s not only the Italian manufacturers who have adopted the 4.0 technology and supply chain transformation, but also the processing equipment and supply chain transformation. In addition, they are trying to cooperate with other enterprises in the supply chain, hoping to have further cooperation plans and information sharing. The survey at the start of the project in 2018 shows that only a few companies are still in the early stage of 4.0 technology investment, and these companies are usually small enterprises. The reason for the investment delay is that these enterprises have been focusing on reducing costs for many years, while ignoring the real sense of innovation and development. As a result, they also suffer from the pressure from market competitors and prices, which has a great negative impact.
The new production mode will not lead to mass production, it can generate essential information data, which allows extreme customization of products and predictive maintenance of machines. This has changed not only the concept of production, but also the concept of service. We find that price competition has become obsolete, and the future of Italian industry is focused on services. In industry 4.0 mode, enterprises can not only meet the needs of consumers or B2B customers by physical products, but also provide new services to meet specific needs (industrial or personal needs) quickly. Therefore, industry 4.0 is not only an element of efficiency, but also a core element of service, aiming to provide specific and expected services to specific customers by producing customized products.
Another challenge Italy focuses on in industry 4.0 is training, with a focus on “people.”. For many years, people have been worried about replacing people’s work with machines. Now it is clear that the role of human beings is still the center of everything. Digitization, in fact, means processing data and transforming it into important information; programming the operation of machines; managing network software, and so on, all of which require human skills. That’s why it’s not a matter of replacing people with machines, but of changing their skills in a process of treating people as network managers.
If the connection of equipment, that is, the data exchange between different participants in the whole supply chain, has become a reality among many Italian manufacturers of printing and paper processing equipment, then Italy’s future will follow two paths: 1. The concept of products is increasingly turning to the concept of service; 2 The role of people (with appropriate digital skills to interpret multidisciplinary data) will become more and more important in this new mode of production.
Post time: Dec-24-2020