Industry 4.0 - Reinforcing the digitalization process

Industrialists have been forced to resort to the massive use of digital tools in order to ensure the continuity of their services during the health crisis. Consequently, Industry 4.0 roadmaps will need to be adjusted to gain more value from accelerated digitalization. Long before the health crisis, industrialists were already subject to a gigantic volume of data and digital content, with unstructured data and structured data arriving from many application databases, often in different formats. All this data can originate from different sources such as business applications, office documents, technical documentation, sensors or new robotic machine tools (IIOT). At this point it should be noted that the size of the global IIOT market is expected to increase from more than $77 billion to more than $110 billion (an annual growth rate of 7.4%) by 2025,. For businesses, the challenge lies in mastering information and therefore data. Bad governance of this mass of data will create more chaos than added value. This was a reality in the industry even before the crisis and it is therefore crucial to set up a digital continuity process. For Industry 4.0, the advantage of digital continuity lies in its ability to have all the information and digital flows of a system, infrastructure or product. This continuity must be sustainable with complete, usable and readily available information which provides businesses with constant quality and service. The future of Industry 4.0 will be defined by the data and the added value that companies will derive from it. It is therefore essential to adopt a data strategy analyzing the digital content produced. To do this, data assets must be mapped. In this form of mapping the data can be classified into 4 sets: partitioned data (hidden in closed databases, applications, etc.), data already under governance, isolated data (extracted from applications, enriched and/or synthesized) and open data.