Manufacturers in the United States, Germany, Japan and China are at the forefront of Industry 4.0, that is, the application of digital transformation in manufacturing industry has brought unprecedented changes, opportunities and challenges. It also includes IOT devices that drive the manufacturing process.
According to PricewaterhouseCoopers 20 16 Global Industry 4.0 Survey, manufacturers plan to invest 907 million US dollars in Industry 4.0 every year (within five years).
According to the report, the main focus of this investment is digital technology, such as sensors or connecting devices, and software and applications, such as manufacturing execution system (MES). Enterprises will also vigorously train employees, hire new experts, and promote enterprise reform.
Urgent need: a wide range of information technology talents
In order to realize this vision, professional IT personnel and technicians will be needed, not just programmers and developers: network engineers will be responsible for connecting everything and ensuring its normal operation. Of course, there are also network security components, and each newly connected device may bring another vulnerability.
We can consider what kind of talents Industry 4.0 needs from the perspective of the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things, including 3D printers and other manufacturing technologies, runs on CNC lathes and newer machines and can perform highly variable multi-step processes through robot vision and artificial intelligence.
There are also cooperative robots, that is, robots that work in cooperation with humans. This environment not only needs a variety of skills, but also needs to integrate these skills in many cases to break through the isolated island and professionalism and create a brand-new category of technical experts: experts who know both operational technology and information technology.
Tanja Reuckert, Executive Vice President of the Internet of Things and Customer Innovation Department of SAP and Vice Chairman of the Steering Committee of the Industrial Internet Alliance (IIC), said: I think we must now consider interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary situations. When you talk about the Internet of Things, people will say that it is about digitalization, but in fact it is about digital business processes. Therefore, I think engineers, network experts, application developers, big data architects, UI (user interface) designers and business people all need to talk and understand each other.
Because of this, many employers are not sure what skills or certificates they need. Industry 4.0 requires all team members to get together to solve interrelated challenges. Of course, we still need professionals, but they must expand their knowledge base, not only to understand IT technology, but also to understand operating technologies such as robots and process automation.
According to the survey of Boston Consulting Group 20 16, this is already a big challenge. Regardless of the size of the company, respondents pointed out that talent recruitment and acquisition of new skills are the most important drivers of Industry 4.0. At present, our company does not have the required talents, and we think it is difficult to find such talents.
Let's take a look at what IT skills manufacturers need when starting the transformation of Industry 4.0:
So far, network security has always been the most concerned issue for enterprises. With the old machine becoming the endpoint of data generation network, connecting new equipment, and then binding back-end ERP system and supply chain, the attack surface of enterprises will expand exponentially.
This requires enterprises to carry out strict supervision and consider safety from the beginning. The existing control system has never been connected to the external network, so it is necessary to strengthen the defense against external attacks. These talents also need to understand the industrial IIoT standard.
Idan Udiedri, a former CEO of Nation-E and an IIoT network security expert, said that when you put a new sensor into an old machine, it becomes a network physical system, which means that network security experts will need to expand their knowledge base and understand the machine-based protocols for 40 years.
He pointed out: the main problem is to connect the old world with the new world. You will see the generator rotating at a speed of 5000 revolutions per minute, and its running speed will also be displayed in the network operation center. But if it is hacked, 10000 rpm, you are finished.
This is why many companies pursuing Industry 4.0 have adopted a more comprehensive approach to safety.
Data scientist-For Industry 4.0, data is the blood of life, so people who know data and how to get information from it are very precious. The deployment of Internet of Things will generate a large amount of data, all of which need to be captured and analyzed to improve machine performance, reduce resource consumption, assist quality control, improve supplier efficiency and introduce new products and services. As more and more improved machines are added to the production type, the production line will continue to improve.
Network-the interconnection between machines and the connection between machines and command and control systems requires the skills of network engineers. They also need to know the skills of WAN, edge network and fog computing, next-generation 5G network technology, WiFi and low-power LAN protocols.
They also need to understand the challenges of connecting systems and machines. In the Industry 4.0 ecosystem, cloud computing is very important, and it will be a priority to transmit data with as low delay as possible.
Said Tabet, chief architect of EMC IoT solution, said that network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) will also be important skills, as will open source technologies.
Software engineers, application developers and programmers-manufacturers will need people who can write and modify programs for machines and develop new interfaces for workers to interact with machines. There will be a lot of data visualization and dashboard work here, because many of these processes will require digital twins so that operators can supervise operations and interactions from the Network Operations Center (NOC).
Enterprises will also need people who know how to write code in Java and old languages such as C and C++. They need to connect traditional systems and machines to new proprietary platforms from different manufacturers as well as ERP systems and supply chain applications. To this end, they must also be familiar with the serial communication protocol and architecture with a history of 40 years.
DevOps and Agile will also be highly sought after skills, and the same talents are those who know about open source projects such as Spark, Kafka and Cassandra, Docker and Kubernetes.
Architects-these are very important talents. IT architects will play a role here to help system engineers in operation integrate the physical and logical worlds. The talent in this position will need to understand the company's existing business, processes and digital transformation goals, and then figure out how to combine these through technology.
Hill of OSU said: It is talents who design networks for machines and figure out how to integrate them into ERP systems. You need talents like IT architects, but they also need to know the manufacturing process, so what you really need is digital manufacturing architects.
There will be new job requirements, he needs a strong engineering background, but also needs to know the code and network. In Germany, this is called mechatronics. In America, the name is not so attractive: industrial maintenance technician. But their duty is the same: put everything in the workshop and fix it if something goes wrong.
The report of PricewaterhouseCoopers points out that your success in Industry 4.0 will depend on your skills and knowledge. The biggest obstacle you will face is recruiting new employees and training existing employees. You need to introduce new roles in the company, such as data scientist, user interface designer or digital innovation administrator.