MES & Industry 4.0

In industry 4.0, production is linked to state-of-the-art information and communication technology. The driving force behind this development is the rapidly increasing digitalisation of economy and society. It will have a lasting effect on the way in which industry will produce and work in the future: after steam engines, assembly lines, electronics and IT, intelligent factories, so-called "Smart Factories", will now determine the fourth industrial revolution.

Intelligent, digitally networked systems form the technical basis for it. With their help, a largely self-organised production is to be made possible, at least in theory. In Industry 4.0, people, machines, facilities, logistics and products communicate and cooperate directly with each other. Manufacturing and logistics processes between companies are intelligently interlinked to make industrial production even more efficient and flexible.

Of course, in many cases this is still utopia. Particularly in the supply industry of serial parts with frequent product changes, special boundary conditions apply. Self-organised production is presumably unrealistic in that case, but the versatile linking of data with reasonable correlations will sustainably improve productivity, quality and profitability.