How to Turn a Regular Factory into a Smart Factory | Joachim Hensch | TEDxDEU

[Music] connect a customer with protection and can I turn a regular production into a smart factory think about 1987 and you want to become a tailor so this person on the table is obviously me and behind there's my boss my master tailor he is a master tailor and I'm not I try to learn everything about it what is so special about making suits and I try hard I mean it takes at that time about 40 hours to produce a suit and I hope that it is of a well quality so that he approves it and

for for his customers so I I'm thinking about what makes him so special why is that what makes him successful and again think about a time where there is no internet there's no mobile phone there's no okay Google and hey Siri there's no Khan Academy and there is no youtube videos DIYs or whatsoever so the practically the only thing that you can learn something at that time is reading books there are books of course and building relationships talking to people watch and listen try to understand and try to observe what they do what what that

makes them successful so I'm thinking about him and I'm constantly watching him and I try to understand what is it that connects him to the customer and I I start understanding that he has this obsession with with customers know how he really dives deep too into his clients he knows there there that that trades he knows their behavior how they would wear a suit what kind of pockets they want how there's the poached posture how they like to wear them he even put small fabrics behind the ties so that they can easier find these items

and combine them together and sometimes he was even invited to their homes to to watch their wardrobes and observe everything and suggest some new shoes or some new shirts or whatsoever for the next season so he's really into it he's really understanding his clients and his customers and also what he understands is his toolbox now again this is a very small tailor shop we are eight people so there is no big machine park or there's no no no big technology but he knows very well about this he knows about all the scissors and needles and

the materials the fabrics what kind of buttons are very well with what kind of fabrics what kind of linings would people want and he knows about his workforce he's eight people that we were he he knew very much everything about us who would make the nicest buttonholes who would make the nicest shoulder who is making the the finishing that people that people want or their customer his customers want and then he puts everything together and then this kind of magic happens and this magic happens because he knows everything about his his world of complexity and

and I don't know if you have ever had this moment of buying something or trying something and you then you get this kind of little to smile on your face because you like yourself and that is not so often when you have when you have to do with businessman you know people play cool and they have their suits and ties and whatsoever but when you when you have these people standing in front of a mirror and smiling because the product is right and they like what they see that's actually a moment it's a magic moment

so so that's what I embraced at that time and then I moved on I learned a lot I moved on and then it's 2015 and I'm just assigned to become the boss of 4,000 people and I'm I can tell you if you ever want to physically feel complexity then you surround yourself with 4,000 people which is like in a rock concert and try to feel responsible for them and try to feel the the complexity of these people the different expertise the different personalities the different abilities of all them so so I was asking myself about

what what can I learn from this time and what kind of what can I possibly do to make this company fit also for the next in fourth Industrial Revolution for the next years to come for technology this is on the way and I'm trying to deeply dive into this 4,000 machines four thousand people 2 million shirts a million suit 500,000 women's wear pieces so a huge complexity and overall and then there is this time in 2015 and it's now even further of endless flow of information I mean we are overwhelmed every day from information and

we are even more flat I mean it 20 years ago it was not so easy to to gather information to Dowe nowadays information is flat is everywhere and with information with information comes innovation so the new workforce that we hire the new people that we hire the so-called Generation Y's and zetz the Millennials everyone expects this kind of flat Hiroki this flat information flow in this easiness of being in touch with each other so beaming this Factory into a smart Factory is not only a technical exercise it's actually something that has to do a lot

with people making things flat and making things available for everyone and and we were thinking about how does a factory look like when it is smart how does how does a production look like when it produces only what is needed and we were rethinking the whole concept of a factory now if you think about your smartphone I mean you you can open it and if you have opened ever your smart when you see that it's very dense you know there is not so much in it there's not so much space so we measured actually the

used volume of our factory and we figured out that it's just about 8% 92% was air you know think about your smart phone nine times bigger because of air that's a weird thing so we started to dive into technology and into these 3d space planning technologies and try to understand what's the new technology coming in and we talked about robotics and we are not talking about man versus machine I mean robotics versus people but we talk about an integration of all that into one kind of machine that builds the machine and besides that we live

in digital times every one of you here is physically here but every one of you has a digital copy as well while you are sitting here and listening and talking maybe to your neighbor one part of you is also being in the Internet I mean you have your Facebook account your LinkedIn account your email maybe you write a blog or whatsoever so you have this physical presence and you have this digital presence as well and there's no either/or you didn't give up your physical friends because of adding some Facebook friends in the same behavior we

try to implement in our factory so we try to build this digital copy of what's actually there that means everything that we can imagine and that we see becomes a copy who gets a copy everything is connected within each other and everything will have a digital copy in this Factory and once we done this then we can start connecting this and that's a magic moment because then you start you have a factory that's actually producing goods and you have a digital copy that's actually producing data and with this data you can do a lot I

mean you can start understanding harmony and machine data is like music so what we started to do is measuring every component and we talked about a lot of component again to you again here we measure 26 million data sets of machine data every day and we have about 500 thousand interactions from our workforce with machines or with the process every day so you get to know some you use you get some data where you find patterns and you this is again this when you see machine data it's like music it's like a tact and you

can start analyzing this and you can start working with this data and make predictions or make real-time analyzers you can manage the whole factory way better than you can ever do this with your gut feeling or with your with what you see so it's a bit it's about this connection and it's about this interconnection between physical and digital objects that struck me but then the question is furthermore if we can manage our real-time or our daytime better can we maybe look into the future and that's something that is even more interesting because that might sound

weird but this is something that you do in your private life as well so the next thing that we are thinking about is can we actually from the data of the past make predictions to the future and that's something again you do in your private life every day when you type in Google golf the board golf Google will know if you're looking for a car or if you're looking for sport why does it know it because it knows your behavior it reads your data it reads your search behavior and your browsing behavior so it understands

from the past and from your usage whoo you are what you do and and what it is about and besides if you go to music streaming Dean's services it's the same you go on Spotify and you you listen to some artists and then you start getting suggestions you get genres and you get lists music lists and such so this kind of prediction based on who you are in the digital world is quite interesting and I'd say totally unused in today's manufacturing fields now what we did here is and we started just to dive into this

a little bit we made a pilot about quality because we wanted to increase the quality and we wanted to have a persistent quality so we dived into this data and we made a pilot and with 93% accuracy we could determine who I mean the operator would make what kind of mistake on what kind of model in the shift tomorrow that sounds weird if I know what's going on with with my operators in in the next days to come but that's something that happens nowadays and we talk very much about AI so people everyone talks about

deep learning but it's sometimes we have no idea where or how to use it this is actually very useful we start diving into this data and start making predictions and then the next thing is going to be decision making based on that so if I know what kind of person is making what kind of mistake on what kind of model then I cut start making countermeasures and counter actions and start managing people and skills and operations differently and that's really a total game changer when it comes to managing this kind of complexity and this kind

of technology so if we think about an industry 4.0 approach many people think about something technical that is that is there and I can buy this and I can just just work with it in fact it's not it's embracing technology and lamenting it and it is not available yet diving into smart factories concepts or industry 4.0 is something that you you you create the way on what while walking this is not there and you see this person here this woman she is she is actually checking the cutting quality with augmented reality something that we all

know from Pokemon go in the recent years but here we just use it as as an enabler for people to do a better job so again when we think about technology it's it's it's this old question about am I going to be replaced with these new devices or robots or automation and I believe not but I am absolutely sure it will be very different to to what we have done in the past and how we are connected in the past so can I actually connect a customer to a production I believe yes because connecting the

dots will give us a lot more insights about the customers and people talk about this buzzword customer centricity right now this is actually not this is not new if I think about my former boss thirty years ago it is actually quite old thinking about the customer and doing something for him which is best is something which is very old this was in handcrafts thousand years old so if we build technology and can do this kind of behavior on a massive scale that's the challenge of industry 4.0 and that's I believe is coming so can we

do things here to really move customers nearer to production and produce the right garments and write a parallel for them I think we can thank you very much [Applause]