Next Generation Industrial IoT Digitalization for Traceability in Metal Manufacturing Industry: A Case Study of Industry 4.0
(From the abstract)
This paper investigates digital traceability technologies taking careful consideration of the
company’s needs to improve the traceability of products at the production of GPV Group as well as
the efficiency and added value in their production cycles. GPV is primarily an electronics manufacturing
service company (EMS) that manufactures electronic circuit boards, in addition to big metal
products at their mechanics manufacturing sites. The company aims to embrace the next generation
IoT technologies such as digital traceability in their internal supply chain at manufacturing sites in
order to stay compatible with the industry 4.0 requirements. In this paper, the capabilities of suitable
digital traceability technologies are screened together with the actual GPV needs to determine if
deployment of such technologies would benefit GPV shop floor operations and can solve the issues
they face due to a lack of traceability. The traceability term refers to tracking the geolocation of
products throughout the manufacturing steps and how that functionality can foster further optimization
of the manufacturing processes. The paper focuses on comparing different IoT technologies
and analyze their positive and negative attributes to identify a suitable technological solution for
product traceability in the metal manufacturing industry. Finally, the paper proposes a suitable
implementation road map for GPV, which can also be adopted from other metal manufacturing
industries to deploy industry 4.0 traceability at shop floor level.
Continuous improvement of everything is a core principle of the Lean philosophy in
manufacturing companies. It is the trigger in companies, which drives the digital transformation to ensure long-term success in the so-called factories of
the future.