Powering Up Safety & Productivity

By their very nature, modern warehouse and manufacturing operations are global, hyper-connected, and faced with hyper-competition at every stage of production and processing. Profitability and sustained expansion need the capacity to keep and transform raw inventories into quality goods at the lowest cost and with the least amount of downtime possible.

Nonetheless, throughout the previous three decades, when lean manufacturing acquired widespread awareness and implementation, a number of businesses prioritized lean's unrelenting pursuit of efficiency at the expense of health and safety. Statistics provide proof for this assertion. According to the International Labor Organization, every fifteen seconds a worker dies from a work-related accident or illness, and 153 more are injured on the job. 

In 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics documented 5,333 work-related fatalities in the United States .With these operations at the forefront of Industry 5.0 innovation, organizations are seeking to allow Smarter Manufacturing to remain competitive and relevant, and industrial worker safety is being reprioritized once again. For safer workplaces and results, reimagining safety is becoming an intrinsic component of developing industrial methods and processes.

How Industry 4.0 Differs From 5.0

The continuing Industry 4.0 shift has changed how businesses keep inventories and produce items. Industry 4.0 fostered innovation in industrial operations, resulting in more effective, simplified procedures, speedier output, and less human mistakes. Cyber-physical systems have improved human-machine interaction through simulation and augmented reality for training and control systems, whereas autonomous robots have provided safety interventions, taken over "dirty, dumb, and dangerous" tasks, and augmented human capabilities to increase effectiveness and efficiency.

Businesses have embraced a greater adoption of automation in manufacturing and industrial practices, witnessed a larger scale rollout of machine-to-machine communication and Internet of Things (IoT) integration to accelerate automation, improved communication, self-monitoring capabilities, and even the capacity to analyze and diagnose problems with minimal human intervention.

Industry 5.0 is anticipated to expand on and exploit 4.0's automated, digital, and data-driven framework in the near future. The new paradigm will introduce a more human-centric approach to man-machine interaction, such as the development of collaborative robots (cobots) that adapt to human workers, as well as the incorporation of resilience against external shocks as COVID-19.

Operations will embrace a future powered by data. Every day, data will be added from every new source conceivable, including wearables, robots, software, mobile applications to the edge, and intelligent gadgets. Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, analytics will harness these enormous data sets to better guide autonomous robots and improve operations while providing actionable insight.

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