INTRODUCTION
Since 2014 and based on numerous real-world deployments of Smart Factories (aka 4.0 Industry, Industrial IoT, Industry of the future), it appears as an obvious evidence how challenging it is to explain to many Execs the concepts of the 4.0 Industry.
While at first sight the overall factory and principles look alike, the 4.0 Industry core principles underneath go way beyond the first impression. It usually hits the decades of experience of Execs.
As a result, the misunderstanding of the disruption of 4.0 leads to both a lack of investment and a delay in decisions. In turn, impacting competitivity.
PROBLEM
We tried for years to highlight the leap and the disruptions of those technologies, but nothing was fully satisfying:
Enumerating exhaustively the endless list of new technologies, and what problem it solves
But due to the length of the items, they end-up being scared !
Trying to convince with facts & figures on how to perform better
But it’s not tangible. Besides, Execs don’t need help to read the same facts and figures they could find on their own in newsletters, Gartner and Forrester
Deploying onto their factory free started kit in 4 weeks
But it’s necessarily a small and limited use case, and they don’t see the global picture
Sending Execs to visit multimillion $ showrooms, to get the WAOUW-effect
But the presented use cases are different from their factory
ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
And what if we were wrong for the beginning ? and we adopted an incorrect or incomplete approach? Before trying to create a revolutionary new training material, let’s consider the existing ecosystem.
On the far left-hand side, we find Lego bricks that mimic a factory, but we cannot transpose to a reality Legos; on contrary, on the very right-hand side, we have a heavy-duty Lab platform (initial cost + recurring maintenance + energy consumption) ; something is missing in the middle.
It is where FactoVia comes into play to reinvent the education methods in this field. Vincent Thavonekham, CEO and co-founder of FactoVia had the opportunity to visit a 2010 a Montessori school, where 5-year-old kids manipulate sophisticated concepts such as:
Division by 12
Counting until 1 000
Performing additions such as 3743 + 2532
Equations like Ax²+Bx+C
… This was like an electroshock and eye opening !
Question was “how can those kids understand math at their young age ?”
Back in the 1905, Maria Montessori gathered some tools and created new ones with key concepts :
Attractive and pedagogical tools
Fun and inspiring learning techniques
Self-learning and self-discovery, where failures are welcomed and represents opportunities to learn, rather than actions to be blamed
Encapsulate complexities to make those concepts available through various manipulations, and via various angles
The results are kids with self-motivation and creativity.
Let's consider the Cube-Root of 1000. For example, adults solve that the with numerous abstract calculation and demonstrations (source cube-root-of-1000).
Whereas a 5-year-old kids finds the result of 10 easily via gaming and tangible manipulations : They feel and understand that the answer is 10, because it is precisely the number of beads that touches a table.
25-seconds video : Kid learning Cube-root of 1000 the Montessori way
And what if the Smart Factory topic could be as easy ?
SOLUTION
Let us consider the philosophy of the Raspberry PI. It aims at democratizing the usage of computers by miniaturing and lowering the price. Yet it is a fully functional computer with a lot more use cases than regular PCs. Besides, by Open Sourcing it, the knowledge is spread largely worldwide, providing benefits to kids, adults and industries. This is exactly the aim of FactoVia One, the mini-factory : it is a combination of real industrial hardware, software, protocols, and pedagogy. We don't to Top-Down teaching, but rather ask the learner to manipulate tangible material to build-up this own self-awareness of WHY we need Connected Factories, and HOW the technologies of Industry 4.0 could help.
This is a completely new approach !
We validated this principles with an extensive study involving +11 000 individuals mostly in Europe. Other nationalities involved Japan and Americans.
The design of this invention needed the involvement of the 3 categories of people :
Teacher and researcher
Escape game designer
And psychologists specialized in User Experience in industry
and in 2022, it was important to have one industrial requirement : have a true functional mini-factory, accredited by leading industries such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Advantech, DELL, HiveMQ, OPC foundation, Microsoft, …
Conclusion
At FactoVia, we invested a large amount of time and money to create FactoVia One. We are developing some other versions too (FactoVia Two and FactoVia Lite). Thanks to the Open Source and the Open Hardware communities, we had the contribution of hundreds of people worldwide, from the US to Australia.
FactoVia One has already been sold and it has already helped students and professionals to grasp Industry 4.0 quickly. Depending on the versions, we could have the following true use cases :
Security: Cyber security with brute-force attacks
Savings: Performance / environmental impact / quality monitoring, with real-time alerts and real-time actions back to the factory
Agility : Based on no-code we replace a broken robot by another one from another vendor, without the need of asking an expert in recoding everything for this new brand of robots
Remote Assistance : due to COVID-19, few experts are helping a remote site using augmented reality that are located on the other side of the planet
Maintain a large number of factories : using “Digital Twins” perform updates, real-time monitoring and querying any assets A marketplace offers other use cases ; some of them are free and open sourced ; some of them are closed source and available at a fee.
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