The impact of the 4th industrial revolution on maintenance technicians

Some events in What many people do not know is that the existing state structures were not ready to recognise the new authority. Officials at ministries, banks, town halls, courts, schools, post offices, telegraph offices and other institutions went on strike against the Bolshevik coup. The National Bank refused to give money to the communist government. However, the officials involved were taken at gunpoint by Bolsheviks and forced to open the vaults. History is not always kind to people who resist change too much...

The 4th industrial revolution

100 years later, we are experiencing another revolution that will have a great impact on many people.   The Fourth Industrial Revolution, often referred to as Industry 4.0, is the transition to smart factories through a combination of cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things (IoT).  
Previous industrial revolutions freed humanity from animal energy, enabled mass production and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This fourth industrial revolution, however, is fundamentally different. It is characterised by a series of new technologies that merge the physical, digital and biological worlds (*). It affects all economies, all industries and all disciplines. So also your company, your department and your job, dear reader. 
 

The first wave

Today, we are flooded with increasingly cheap solutions to make data from all kinds of systems available via network or the Internet. Gartner Inc. predicts that 8.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide by the end of this year, an increase of 31 per cent compared to 2016. Predictions are for 20 billion in 2020 and 70 billion in 2025. Around 60% of these are industry-related! So you can be sure that also in your working environment more and more things will be monitored by intelligent systems on site or remotely. Thanks to Predictive Analytics, the connected machines and installations will autonomously warn you when a failure is imminent. In itself, this is nothing new for a maintenance service. Online condition monitoring has been around for years. But the scale of application through ever lower investment costs is unprecedented. Moreover, the monitoring systems are much more intelligent, allowing them to predict the remaining usable life span more accurately. 

So is there still a future for maintenance technicians?

These new technologies will ensure that we will do much more condition-based maintenance than we do today. We will therefore have fewer major breakdowns and carry out less unnecessary preventive maintenance.  Predictions will also allow us to plan maintenance better and thus carry it out more efficiently. Does this mean that we will need fewer maintenance technicians? I do not think so. Things made by people will continue to break down and the entire 4.0 infrastructure will need to be maintained. However, the job content of our technicians will change. After all, we will also have a maintenance technician 4.0, connected for direct access to information and for technical support by a specialist. Equipped with smart glasses and wearables that help watch over his/her safety, etc. But a technician equipped with a smart device also becomes a very intelligent and interesting sensor. Technicians as a sensor. You will find a nice example of this further on in this Maintenance Magazine. Let us not forget that also in Industry 4.0, people are our first and most important tools... (*)

Wim Vancauwenberghe
Maintenance Evangelist

PS: Would you like to get a good idea of how companies are already dealing with Maintenance 4.0 today? Reserve 24 to 27 September 2018 in your agenda. BEMAS and the European federation EFNMS will then welcome you in Antwerp at the Euromaintenance 4.0 conference. More about this soon.   

(*) More on this in the book 'The Fourth Industrial Revolution' by Prof. Klaus Schwab, founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum.