By Theresa Wolf and Andrea Willige Automation helped shape the First Industrial Revolution – and it continues to evolve in today’s Fourth. While automation has long been part of the manufacturing landscape, recent advances in artificial intelligence, vision systems and robotics hardware are enabling a new generation of more intelligent and adaptable machines. A new…
Australia risks becoming a mere consumer of technology rather than a producer if it continues following global best practices instead of charting its own course in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, according to Professor Henrik von Scheel, the strategist who coined the term “Industry 4.0”. Speaking ahead of his keynote at Industrial Transformation Australia next week,…
Despite the Industry 4.0 theme emerging from Germany early in the last decade, local uptake of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (or smart factories, 4IR or a handful of other near-synonyms) appears to be slow. The benefits have been spruiked ad nauseum in the intervening years by industrial technology vendors, researchers, manufacturing advocates and others. Yet…
Professor Henrik von Scheel (pictured), an internationally-recognised strategist and futurist known as the man who coined the term Industry 4.0, will feature at the upcoming Industrial Transformation Australia event in Sydney this July. According to a statement from event organisers Hannover Fairs Australia on Monday, von Scheel will reveal what will influence the success of…
As this publication has noted before, one of the defining features of manufacturing in this nation is the large number of small companies. And while we regularly note the SMEs’ entrepreneurial streak and contributions to progress, being of a certain size comes with its limitations. SMEs spend 24 per cent more on R&D than large…
A new report published by the James Martin Institute for Public Policy (JMI) examines the state of Industry 4.0 adoption among NSW SME manufacturers and ways to lift this. Recharging SME manufacturing in NSW, authored by Western Sydney University Associate Professor Dilupa Nakandala, identifies barriers to adoption including “specific leadership capabilities, people, skills and experience,…
DXN in biggest data centre sale Modular data centre manufacturer DXN has signed a contract to supply four cable landing stations for the East Micronesia Cable System. The contracts, worth $5.7 million, is DXN’s largest contract to date. The contracts are for telecommunications operators in the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru and Kiribati and are…
Townsville manufacturer NEM Equipment Hire has been awarded $833,000 through the Made in Queensland programme to buy equipment to drive growth and create 20 new jobs over five years. The Queensland government manufacturing grant will enable the defence and agricultural steel fabricator to purchase a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) Beamline machine that will expand manufacturing…
By Peter Roberts In all the orgy of offshoring that has hollowed out Australian manufacturing in the past few decades, few have stopped to ask why do those companies that remain local manufacturers remain here, when so many now source offshore? Palash Nandy, CEO of electrical equipment manufacturer Legrand Australia and New Zealand, has been…
Not for profit industry development group DMTC Ltd is pioneering an innovative programme that brings together half a dozen like minded defence manufacturers to implement ‘smart enough’ Industry 4.0 technologies to begin their digitisation journey. DMTC’s industry capability development programme leader Charlotte Morris said DMTC provides the SMEs with hardware and open source software to…