The 4.0 Concept in Industry

By: Túlio Camargos Guimarães.

Industry 4.0 aroused my interest due to my commercial role in the group where I work and being part of a company's corporate structure with my family. At Franzen, one of our best-selling products is the automatic lubrication system for stationary and mobile equipment. Another company, called Pães D'Iara, took this concept into production, aiming to automate the process more and more, thus gaining productivity at agility.

In the visits I make through Franzen, I still see many people who don't know Industry 4.0 and are resistant to change. Not every customer I visit has to buy the product, but it's a perception I've noticed over time. Many consider that innovation arrives to take the space of a worker when, most of the time, he comes to facilitate and, consequently, he has time for other tasks, optimizing his work. On the other hand, there is the investment factor, which always looks only at the cost disregarding the benefits that this evolution will bring, even when presented with short-term gains scenarios.

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To delve deeper into the 4.0 concept, I will talk a little about industry 3.0, which began in the 70s, based on industrial automation, where computers and robots entered the production process. Even though it's already in the past for many companies, we can still see countless companies that have not even evolved to industry 3.0 and are living in industry 2.0 with manual production. That happens, among other reasons, due to a lack of resources. There are still many regions in the world that do not even have access to the internet and live a different reality than most, but, in my opinion, the thing that hinders evolution the most is the fear of change. Just look around to find several indications. In my family, for example, there are people who, despite being able to afford an electric coffee maker where the coffee comes out in 2 minutes with the same taste, prefer heating the water and straining the coffee powder, often without being able to make enough coffee for a snack. They don't change for fear of altering that ancient process.

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The 4th Industrial Revolution is coming to break paradigms and digitize productive activities, facilitating human-machine interaction and connecting everything through the internet with data speed. There are countless benefits for the company, such as productivity gains, easy access to information, reduction of errors in the production process, and, consequently, more decisive decisions, among others.

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Every innovation applied in production will make the company progress considerably, and whoever joins will be prepared for the future more quickly. Information in their hands makes life easier for managers, who sometimes need to make decisions quickly and with insufficient data.

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In the course of the studies and meetings I have held, this fact became increasingly clear. And those who do not adhere to innovations will, unfortunately, be left behind. BBI has shown us several cases of companies that did not follow the evolutionary process and ceased to exist, such as Kodak and Blockbuster. The world is constantly evolving, and we must understand and keep up with it. There will still be several new professions, equipment, and technologies, everything is connected, and anyone unaware of evolutions will be offline from the world.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

 

GOEPIK. 2020. Os benefícios de implementar a Indústria 4.0 em 2020. Available at: https://www.goepik.com.br/beneficios-implementar-industria40-em-2020. Accessed on September 8th, 2021.

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PORTAL DA INDUSTRIA. 202[?]. Indústria 4.0: Entenda seus conceitos e fundamentos. Available at: http://www.portaldaindustria.com.br/industria-de-a-z/industria-4-0/. Accessed on September 2nd, 2021.

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SCHWAB, Klaus. A quarta revolução industrial. Trad. Daniel Moreira Miranda. São Paulo: Edipro, 2016. 159p.

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SUMIG. 2019. Por que você deve pensar na Indústria 3.0 antes da 4.0? Available at: https://www.sumig.com/pt/blog/post/por-que-voce-deve-pensar-na-industria-30-antes-da-40/. Accessed on September 18th, 2021.

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