Hallam’s Kyle Walker, IT graduate and automation engineer, presented a paper on “Industry 4.0 – Implementation in Practice” at Doncaster MBC’s Engineering and Manufacturing Forum at Unipart Rail’s headquarters in Doncaster on 11th November.

Other speakers were from the University of Birmingham and the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, University of Sheffield.

Kyle’s paper identified the key benefits of adopting Industry 4.0 principles including system integration for improved management information, providing an information platform for “lean” and “agile” manufacturing models, and allowing “blockchain” techniques to be applied to supply chain monitoring for complete transparency.

Operational Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), through the generation of predictive preventative maintenance schedules, would also improve. Industry 4.0 pathways also lead to the worlds of Machine (artificial) Intelligence and Virtual and Augmented Reality.

A fascinated audience was keen to ask many questions at the end of Kyle’s presentation!