Industry 4.0: building the digital workforce of tomorrow

In the context of Industry 4.0, new emerging data analytics solutions can have a significant impact on improvements in operating efficiency. Regardless of the industry segment, the potential is estimated to be in the range of 3-5% improvement in return on sales.

In general there are two possible solutions evolving beyond the focus of APC:

• Utilizing generic data science tooling in combination with the scarcely available data scientist to solve operating problems
• An emerging domain called self-service analytics which opens up possibilities to empower the process expert to use advanced analytics themselves to directly solve the bulk of day to day operating issues

The upside of the self-service analytics approach is the sheer number of opportunities across the organization combined with its low cost of implementation when compared to classical APC solutions. The impact of self-service analytics has significant potential: it is estimated that on up to 10,000 small and mid-size manufacturing performance opportunities the gained profits can add up to €500 million. This can be compared with the potential gains of up to €50 million based on general data science solutions (source: McKinsey research).

In general it is evident that both solutions hold great improvement potential and ideally work in harmony together to build a mature digital organization.