Before jumping to the pros and cons of industrial revolution 4.0, it is important to understand industrial revolution 4.0. Industrial Revolution 4.0: Industrial revolution 4.0 is the term that is used to describe the transition from an electronic-based industry to the one that is dominated by the fusion of new and emerging fields and ideas like Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and green energy, etc.
‘Industry 4.0’, is the era of digitalization. The term originated from Hanover Messe 2011 and was incorporated in German high-tech strategy. Much is attributed to Klaus Schwab, a German engineer who founded the World Economic Forum. Two years later, the Industry 4.0 Platform (central network for digital transformation) was set up to make it work. It is characterized by 4 physical and digital trends: 1 Autonomous motor vehicles (cars, trucks, drones, aircraft, water vessels); 2 3D printing (medical implants); 3 Advanced robotics (Agri to health care); 4 New materials (graphene).
Benefits: Some of the benefits are as follows
- It helps relieve poverty and improve people standard of living
- With artificial intelligence and fast-paced internet like 5G, there will be better diagnosis, cheaper and better medical services.
- The emergency of new and innovative technologies helps better undertake better security, surveillance and search and rescue operations.
- India has currently announced a new drone policy that allows for efficient security, traffic, and mapping.
- It will help connect every last village in the country to ensure better government services and improved infrastructure for all.
- Artificial intelligence will play a significant role in changing the lives of specially-abled able.
- It promotes ease of doing business and ease of living.
- The improved early warning systems weather forecasting systems etc. and assure improved disaster management reduce of causality, faster evacuations.
- The improvement in fields of biotechnology, AI, pest control mechanism, innovative irrigation system, etc. allows for increased crop production.
Pros and cons of industrial revolution 4.0
| PROS | CONS |
| Industry 4.0 helps us to improve operational performance and efficiency. With minimum machine downtimes, we can produce more and faster while allocating resources more cost-effectively and efficiently. | Data security issues are one of the main concerns for the manufacturers as they believe investing in smart factories may increase the risk of security breaches and the chance of proprietary production knowledge theft. |
| Since most of the production processes are automated, high-quality standards can be maintained at a lower manufacturing cost. | Technical glitches loss of high-paying jobs and resistance from stakeholders to invest in new technologies are few entry-level barriers towards industry 4.0. |
| It can also enhance flexibility, speed to market, and agility for launching new products and services. It is easier to scale production up or down in a smart factory with minimum modifications. | Social issues and their impact on society are a few of the notable cons. Earlier industrial revolutions as they went through made Huge changes in social terms. There was a lot of urbanization and industrialization. There is uncertainty as to how things will shape up now. |
| Industry 4.0 presents an opportunity to improve customer experience and service by reducing resolution time, fewer defects, and offers more product choices to the customers. | Interoperability, information transparency, automation, and integration of the production process are a few critical changes lying ahead for all the existing manufacturers. |
| It makes compliance easier – complying with regulations in industries like pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing does not have to be a manual process. Instead, industry 4.0 technologies make it possible to automate compliance including track and trace, quality inspections, serialization, data logging, etc. | Skill education and training of manpower need to be improved and it takes a good chunk of investment. |
Blackcoffer Insights 16: Harsh Gupta from PIBM, Pune
