Lab Talk: Dr. Stefan Ferber gave us a lecture about Industry 4.0

On July 12, 2013 Dr. Stefan Ferber gave a talk at Intuity Media Lab GmbH about the technology trend “Internet of Things”  (IoT) and its impact on many vertical markets like energy, mobility, and healthcare. This talk investigates the potential of IoT on production and related logistics. The term “Industrie 4.0” was depicted in German industry to emphasize the huge opportunities for this trend.

Not only could IoT help to increase productivity in general but also allows for faster, smaller, and customized production while keeping production costs and administrative overhead low. IoT in production and logistics also enables so called predictive maintenance by which a machine will tell its operator which parts needed to be replaced just before they malfunction and thwarts production. Also worth mentioning are interwoven production sites. This concept of IoT basically offers different production facilities to be connected with each other so that production and delivery of ordered parts could happen in real time and therefore keep storage costs low. The most important aspect of IoT in production and logistics is the shift away from classical value added chain towards business ecosystems.

IoT offers almost endless possibilities which will ultimately have social cultural effects on how humans and machines, machines and machines, as well as humans and factories will interact with each other. In order to tackle the big topic IoT several small scaled prototypes are favored, as they could give immediate feedback on what’s working, what needs to be improved, and what’s not working at all. And here at Intuity we love to build prototypes and are excited to tackle IoT in production and logistics from a designer’s perspective.

Dr. Stefan Ferber is a well known and well respected expert in the area of Internet of Things and Industrie 4.0. He works as Vice President Business Development at Bosch Software Innovations and travels all around the world to give lectures on above mentioned topics.