Industry 4.0: Dashboard’s Expertise

Looking back on history, we can pinpoint certain periods that shaped the future and changed the way the everyday world functions.

These are, for example, the original Industrial Revolution from the 1800s, the Second Industrial Revolution just over a decade ago and the Digital Revolution in the mid-1900s. These periods can rarely be predicted, but are recognisable during or after their commencement. As it stands, the technology industry believes that we are on the brink of the next significant time period of technology development; called Industry 4.0, this trend represents the rapid movement of companies towards automation and data exchange that has become apparent over the last few years.

Whilst some sources would say that this trend is mainly centred around manufacturing, the experts, ourselves included, can see the trend adopted among many industries with manufacturing identified as the source of this habit. As a wider concept, this is sometimes called Business 4.0, which considers businesses in general as opposed to one area only.

For Industry 4.0 to work on a realistic, functional level it requires many supporting technologies. One of these, perhaps the most important one, is IoT, which can be used for business planning, development, manufacturing, and services. These areas all create data that generates valuable feedback, which in turn closes the information loop, so to speak.

According to Krishnan Ramanujam, President of Business & Technology Services at TCS – Tata Consultancy Services, an Indian IT services company with a revenue of over $17 billion – there are two approaches to benefitting from Industry 4.0 and implementing it accordingly. The first one focusses on improving operations using a value stream map, whereas the second approach has a main objective of understanding the business processes. There is one similarity, however: both approaches use and strongly engage with IoT to add value. In terms of operations improvement, IoT and related analytics lower costs, make execution faster and boost performance higher; for the purposes of deeper understanding, IoT can help create new services that enhance operational performance.

Industry 4.0 describes Dashboard’s place within the industry perfectly. Founded in 2015, right at the beginning of the peak of this era, we are at the very forefront of IoT and provide the very services described above. Our passion for improving performance by implementing innovative, unique IoT solutions allows us to embrace everything positive about Business 4.0 and maximise the value that our customers can extract from their technology, analytics and intelligence. On the other hand, we are conscious of the drawbacks, such as security issues and the need for reliability, and are able to combine prevention with streamlining the business towards a more efficient process.

We believe that this alignment of values, skills, and knowledge as well as successful timing that provides countless opportunities, is what makes us special within the field of IoT. Bringing together the expertise of some of the best specialists in the field, we are able to capitalise on the most notable characteristics of Industry 4.0: customisation, leveraging ecosystems, risk control and creation of value. Whilst currently it is still growing and formulating, the peak is just around the corner and Dashboard is ready to embrace it fully.