Managing Operations Of Planning And Control In The Fourth Industrial Revolution Essay.

Smart Supply Chain and its relevance

Describe about the Report for Managing Operations of Planning and Control.

Industrial 4.0 is the further developmental stage for companies and the management of the supply chain processes that are found in the manufacturing industry. This also referred to the fourth industrial revolution, the concept is widely found in Europe and the united states manufacturing sector (Lasi, et al., 2014). In other words, it is also referred to as the internet of things.  However, this depends on different technologies that cover integrated planning, systems executions, autonomous logistics, smart procurement and warehousing, advanced analytics and logistics visibility.  In doing this, the results will in the end enable the companies to act towards the disruption in the supply chains and anticipate them through fully modelling the network (Parson, 2015). Creating the anticipated scenarios and be able to adjust the supply chains for the companies in this manner. After this is built, the components will be seen to develop gradually. This is because the digital supply chains is important in offering a new degree of responsiveness and resiliency to allow companies which get there fast to beat competition  so as to provide customers with some of the most efficient and transparent services around.

Smart Supply Chain and its revelance

Smart supply chain will mean that company products will be delivered to the customers in a much more standardized process. Analysis of markets will look at the demand of customers and be able to predict sales in the periods to come. By use of these information, manufacturing orders and material, components and areas that calls for the anticipation capacity. Distribution accounts for the new changes in the capacity of products through the pipeline and informing customers on when shipment is expected.  When this is done well, then there will be a small gap between supply and demand at each point of the chain.  Asghar, et al. (2015) argues that at time this might not happen. Since the forecasting will always be an inexact science and information will usually depend on some inconsistent and incomplete features. In most cases, manufacturing will operate independently from the customer, marketing and suppliers among other partners.  Another factor will be lack transparency which mean that no links in the supply chains may understand what other link will be doing or needs to be doing (Rubenstein, 2014). At the end of the day, it will look like the orderly flow from marketing to the customer will be disrupted in some way.

Economic, Environmental and Social Impacts

In the coming years, this is bound to change. This may not be linked to having fewer disruptive weather events, outsourcing messes or flat tires. What is bound to change will be the supply chains itself. With the emergence of digital supply chain, businesses will dissolve and every like is bound to have its full visibility on the needs and challenges of other groups.  At this, demand and supply signals are also going to originate at the point and travel immediately all around the network. Low levels of critical raw material, and the shutdown of major plant and other increases with regard to customer demand and other such information are going to be visible all through the system in real time. In this regard, all players and customers need to plan accordingly. In addition, transparency is going to allow companies to anticipate them and not only to react to disruption. It calls for modelling the network and creating the ‘what if’ scenarios. It will also adjust the supply chains immediately due to the changing conditions (Pattinson & Brown, 2006).  The main goal of the digital supply chain thus is very ambitious in this sense. It needs to build together new types of supply chain networks which are both responsive and resilient.

However, in the event that companies need to make the digital supply chain, or in other words, need to make a smart supply chain, then they not only need to manage the technologies but they also need to build capabilities.  There will also be a great need to find people with the right skills and manage the shift to a culture which is willing to carry out the effort. In other words, they should transform their entire organisations. They supply chain should look at eight major elements which incorporate procurement, logistic visibility, smart supply and digital supply chain management.  Other areas will be procurement 4.0, smart warehousing, autonomous and B2C logistics, spare parts management and digital supply chain enablers (Sanders, et al., 2016). If one has a company that is able to put together these areas in a more coherent and fully transparent whole, will be able to realize a lot of advantages in the customer care service, cost reduction, efficiency and flexibility.

Economic, Environmental and Social Impacts

With the growth of industrial internet, business are going to shift from products and concentrate more on the outcome based services. These services will concentrate on areas that business will be able to compete on the ability to delivery measurable results for their customers. Some of these outcomes will have social, economic and environmental impacts in the industry.  This will also range from definite machine rising on the plant floor to the major sums of dynamism savings on commercial buildings and other definite crop yields in exact tract of farmland. To be able to deliver these types of outcomes, then companies will be required to have new levels of collaborations ecosystem and business partners (ChinaNews, 2014). They need to bring together all players who will contribute their products and services in order to meet the needs of their customers. Also the software platforms are going to emerge so as to better facilitate capturing of data, aggregation and exchange all around the ecosystem. They will also assist in creation, distribution and monetization of new services and products to extraordinary scale and speed. Big winners in this sense will be the stage owners and business associates who are able to join the system effect that are characteristic in the new digital business models and create new types of worth. For example, Qualcomm Life’s 2net platform is able to support several connected devices which also contribute to the health data of patients and improve the hospital to home economic and health outcomes (ChinaNews, 2014).

Another finding also demonstrates that the rise of industrial internet is going to drive growth productivity in offering new chances for individuals when it comes to skills upgrade and taking on new jobs. There will be an irresistible majority of executives that prove the growing of digital labor in form of smart sensors,  robots and intellectual assistants are going to transform these skills and be able to focus more on the workforce of the future (Blog, 2010).  In the event of lower skilled jobs, whether cognitive or physical will also be highly substituted by use of machines in the coming years. The industrial internet in this sense will be able to create high skilled and very new use of engineers. Companies are also going to use industrial internet technologies when augmenting employees and making their work safer and more industrious, engaging and flexible. As the trends continue to take hold and new needed skills, people are going to rely more on machines on the job training and development of skills.

In order to realize the full potential of industrial internet, it is also important for governments to overcome several important hurdles. One of the main ones will be the security and privacy of data that are currently rising in the relevance when looking at the vulnerability of attacks, data breaches and espionage which are motivate by increased data sharing and connectivity. It is only until the recent times that cyber security seem to focus on the limited number of ends. In the event of the rising industrial internet, the measures are no longer going to be adequate in relation to their virtual and physical worlds as they pool in a huge scale (Parson, 2015). There is also need for organisations to equip themselves with new security frameworks which will extent the whole cyber and physical heap from the level of the device and the application of this security to resiliency and wide assurance of the system.

It will also need to look at different incidence response models.  Another very crucial impact will be on having no evidence of interoperability on current systems that meaningfully escalate the cost and complexity in the industrial internet deployment. In modern technology for operation systems in includes working mainly in silos. However, when looking at the forthcoming, there will be fully practical digital ecosystems that call for unified data sharing among machines and other systems in a physical manner that are derived from diverse manufacturers (Lasi, et al., 2014).  The road towards seamless interoperability is also going to be more complicated through the long life duration of organic industrial tools that are going to require costly  replacement and fitting to work with newest technologies around. In addition, other realized blockades and risk will involve unforeseen return on investment when it comes to new technologies, internet technologies and immature governance of data. Industrial internet will thus surpass geographic limitations and a scarcity of digital talent. By overwhelming these trials, there is need for more investment, leadership and collaborative actions among the entire key stakeholder.

With regard to several industries, energy companies, health care providers and agriculture production, the adoption of industrial internet will look at the incremental results that emphasizes on the increase of revenue and savings. In this regard, most businesses are revolving in the digital technology to drive down the cost and increase the rate of growth among different companies. Some of the areas include optimizing utilization of assets and other very extremely important drivers for the adoption. In addition, industrial internet will enable creation of other revenue creeks on new services and products.  The other very common presentation of industrial internet will be the remote asset management and the predictive maintenance (Ji, et al., 2016). This will be able to reduce failures of equipment and other unexpected downtime based on the data operations which are now available. In addition, early industrial internet adopters like caterpillar, ThyssenKrupp and Thames Water  are already proof of the benefits of industrial internet (Roblek, et al., 2016).

 For example, Thames water which is the largest drinking and waste- water service provider in the united kingdom are using sensors, real time data and analytics in anticipating failure of equipment and responding more quickly to the critical situations like water leaks and other unexpected weather events (Roblek, et al., 2016).  In addition, leading mining companies like Rio Tinto have been able to turn to new and very autonomous mining equipment which are able to enhance mine productivity. As the company introduces remote monitoring and sensing technologies, they are able to dramatically increase safety related incidents and make mining easy even in harsh locations. This also provide more returns for the company in terms of profitability.  In addition, societies all round, the implementation of industrial internet is able to provide several opportunities for the governments and citizens in each level to improve government services and be able to enhance the life quality of the companies (Lasi, et al., 2014).  

One example is with ShotSpotter which has been able to use connected microphones in determining when a gunshot is fired in public or when helping the police to identify areas that guns fired at them are located.  Also in the United States, the Oakland city of California has seen the largest drop in homicide cases in all major cities in the United States since 2013/ this is as results of deploying industrial internet systems in the city (Parson, 2015). Several other cities around the world also turn to smart parking solutions. These include street line which enable drivers to conveniently and quickly find available parking spaces.

Conclusion and recommendation

In conclusion, to enable industries seize the new opportunities, it will need capitalization of the long term structural shift and increase the overall development of the industrial internet. First, providers of technology will need to begin to inventory and share among each other some of the best internet security practices. This can be done by establishing the main security common. They will need to involve themselves in the development of technology test beds and demonstrate ways that security solutions from different organisations are going to work together. At this, they will need to focus on brownfield innovation and support the existing equipment in the field. They shall also raise the market awareness on the most successful use cases and implementation. 

In addition, technology adopters are going to orient their overall business strategy to take full advantage of the latest innovations in the industrial internet. At this, they should identify various ecosystem partners, and decide if they need to join a partner’s platform or develop their own. Industries that still show evidence of lack of industrial internet need to find one or two important pathfinder applications that will be piloted in the coming days to create the best momentum of learning (ChinaNews, 2014).

Another recommendation will go to the public policy makers.. They will be called upon to revisit different security regulations on these to encourage investment and the adoption of the new internet processes. For example, when looking at the new markets, it will be important for governments to increase their investment in digital formats. For example, the broadband connectivity and other embedded sensors. By doing this, they will be able to take advantage of the growing opportunities of the industrial internet and accelerate the regional and economic growth for their country (Ji, et al., 2016).

With regard to policy makers, industrial internet calls on them to learn more on the implications of the policies to the society with regard to industrial internet. At this they should ensure that it serves as a role model and advocate for the support of high-potential applications like smart cities. Also all the organisations stakeholders will be required to work together in several areas. The first one is academia, then industries and governments. They should work together to collaborate on the long term research and development which will provide solution to main challenges of technology in relation to security, management of risks in the systems and interoperability. They should thus conduct a joint lighthouse project which will be able to demonstrate the real benefits and rise to the profile need for successful implementation of industrial internet and other forms of public. They should also implement the new programs of training and be able to provide incentives for policies for workers and employers that encourage reskilling for high demand job categories.

References

Asghar, M., Kumar, G. & Patra, M., 2015. Societal Change and Transformation by Internet of Things (IoT). International Journal of Computer Networks, 7(2), pp. 18-24.

Blog, c., 2010. Digital transformation. [Online]
Available at: https://blogs.cisco.com/digital
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ChinaNews, 2014. "Industry Transformation, Software Defined Everything, the Internet of Things and Cybersecurity to offer greatest opportunities in APAC for 2015, says Frost & Sullivan". China Weekly News, p. 208.

Ji, F., Zhang, T., Wu, F. & Mou, Y., 2016. "Simulation of Influencing Factors in Internet-Enabled Transformation Performance of Traditional Enterprise Based on System Dynamics". Revista Ibérica de Sistemas e Tecnologias de Informação, Volume E5, p. 387.

Lasi, H. et al., 2014. Industry 4.0. Business & Information Systems Engineering , 6(4), pp. 239-242.

Parson, G., 2015. "Internet of things: fundamental transformation agent [Editor's Note]",. IEEE Communications Magazine, 53(9), pp. 2-2.

Pattinson, H. & Brown, L., 2006. Chameleons in marketspace: industry transformation in the new electronic marketing environment. Internet Research, 6(3), pp. 31-40.

Roblek, V., Meško, M. & Krapež, A., 2016. A Complex View of Industry 4.0. SAGE Open, 6(2), pp. 34-39.

Rubenstein, J., 2014. Profile of the Automobile and Motor Vehicle Industry: Innovation, Transformation, Globalizatio.. s.l.: Business Expert Press..

Sanders, A., Elangeswaran, C. & Wulfsberg, J., 2016. Industry 4.0 implies lean manufacturing: Research activities in industry 4.0 function as enablers for lean manufacturing. Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management, 9(3), pp. 811-833.