Simple Solutions That Work! Issue 9

WILLIAM SHAMBLEY President NEW ENGLAND FOUNDRY TECHNOLOGIES FOUNDRY INDUSTRY 4 POINTO Early one morning, I looked up the Industrial Revolution 4.0, and my first attempt at reading about it was a jumble of new jargon and buzzwords that I couldn’t deal with before coffee. The pundits currently say we’re on the Fourth industrial revolution . Pre-caffinated cogerism aside, industrial revolutions have been fairly important to the manufacturing sector, so I dug down into the cereal box and pulled out the magic decoder ring. The following is a look at the tangible elements of this next wave of technology cresting over the foundry industry, and how it is starting to impact the shop floor. 1From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0 In the First Industrial Revolution we stopped making everything by hand, and started tooling up machines to make things faster, cheaper, and more consistently. People still did most all of the work and made all the decisions. In the Second Industrial Revolution we set up our tools in assembly lines, used electricity and simple, physical automation to make more stuff, faster, cheaper, with less thought, and less people. In the Third Industrial Revolution we used computers, digital data, and motorized systems to streamline the design, production, and quality control of production, and started to log data – but people were still ultimately in charge of and required for all decisions that required thinking. BACK-2-BASICS 4 EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES