Polish factories are far from being the leaders of Industry 4.0

Although last year was supposed to be a breakthrough for the development of digitization in Poland, the latest Digi Index shows that we are far from the leaders of Industry 4.0. The way to reduce these disparities is simple: we should accelerate the digital transformation of companies in our country.

Siemens introduced an innovative indicator — Digital Enterprise Index, which allows to assess the level of digitization of the company, the manufacturing industry and even the entire economy in individual countries. Digi Index 2020 has a 4-point scale. In the report published this year, the level of digitization of production in Poland among the following industries: Food & Beverages, Chemistry & Pharmacy, Automotive and Machinery was rated at 1.9 points, while the countries that are digitization leaders exceeded 3.5 points.

The differences between individual European countries are also confirmed by the report “State of Data Innovation in the EU”, prepared by the Center for Data Innovation analytical center, which presents how the EU Member States are developing in terms of digitization. Poland took a weak 20th place in this ranking, being in the general classification of, among others behind Lithuania, Latvia and Slovakia. These data show that Polish manufacturing companies should urgently start introducing changes in the field of digitization.

Polish entrepreneurs are open to digitization

Despite not very optimistic statistics, Polish industrial enterprises declare that they are open to digitization. This is confirmed by the report “Challenges of Polish enterprises in the era of Industry 4.0”, prepared by ASD Consulting experts. Based on the analysis of the responses of over 130 production managers representing over a dozen different industries, incl. food, automotive or heavy industry, it turned out that only 8% of companies use preventive maintenance methods, i.e. data analysis on potential failures or parts exploitation. They also indicated a very low share of automatic data collection. On the other hand, as many as 43% of respondents in the next 2 years, and 16% in the next 2–5 years, want to implement solutions for data analysis in their enterprises. These declarations show that managers are well aware of the need to invest in digitization and improving the organization of production.

The representatives of manufacturers participating in the Siemens study are of a similar opinion. In their opinion, the main advantages of companies that decide to invest in digital transformation include, among others process optimization (36%) and cost savings (35%). At the same time, manufacturers’ representatives point to the greatest barriers related to the introduction of this type of changes, including lack of financial support, dedicated digitization teams or lack of knowledge on how to effectively use the collected data. For this reason, only 3% of respondents confirmed that the level of digitization in their companies exceeds 80%, while about 30% of enterprises define it at the level of 40–59%.

New possibilities of digitization

How to effectively accelerate the level of digitization of Polish manufacturing companies, while increasing production efficiency? The FitMech platform, used for automatic data collection, analysis and visualization, comes in handy.

With detailed data from easy-to-install and set-up vibration sensors, you’ll get a complete picture of how individual machines work.

How it works?

Sensors attached to the machines measure vibrations and anomalies that arise during their operation. Then, the data from the sensors is sent to the cloud computing, which processes it, identifying machine status and detecting work cycles and unplanned downtime. This information appears in the Operator Panel, which enables the determination of the causes of detected interruptions in the operation of monitored devices. Then the data is sent back to the cloud, and the Online Panel presents the results of data analysis from sensors and the Operator Panel in the form of live view and reports.

In this way, the FitMech platform solves the biggest barriers to digitization of industrial plants indicated by the producers participating in the Siemens study, i.e. the lack of dedicated teams specializing in digitization or the lack of knowledge on how to use the obtained information. Thanks to detailed reports:
- you will find out what the real performance, availability and capacity of your machines is — this way you will be able to optimize your production plans,
- you will get access to the statistics of each machine and for each change in real time or summarizing the whole year — thanks to them you will learn about bottlenecks in the production process,
- you will identify the causes of downtime, their actual number, duration and the exact date of their occurrence — this information will help to eliminate, among others barriers for operators,
- it will be easier for you to control the duration of maintenance, retooling or calibration for each machine — this will translate into increased work efficiency.

Do you want to learn more about the possibilities of the FitMech platform and the additional benefits that you can achieve thanks to it? Contact Rafał Pieczyński or Szymon Arciszewski.