WHAT IS IT ABOUT ?

Industry 4.0 (from German "Industrie 4.0") is the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. It includes cyber-physical systems, the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) and cloud computing. Industry 4.0 creates what has been called a "smart factory".

The Industrial Internet-of-Things is a network of smart assets interconnected through the Internet in order to deliver actionable insights to various stakeholders throughout the value stream.

WHY DOES IT MATTER ?

37% CAGR is projected for the Asia-Pacific over the next five years and 81% of leaders believe that successful adoption of IIoT will be critical to their company's future success.

We believe your company should be in Industry 4.0 not because it is trendy but because it helps you improve what you are already doing. IIoT can help you solve business problems, fuel your growth, cut wastes and even develop new business models. In short, you can deliver better business outcomes.

WHAT You CAN EXPECT ?

Understanding your business needs is key to us. We work in a collaborative and methodical way to assess your situation and understand your vision before we develop with you a tailored approach.

We are passionate about your success. We are committed to walk you through the strategy development, gap analysis and through proof-of-concept to project management in the implementation phase.

Thomas Voss is the founder of FabForward and a veteran in the electromechanical industry, bringing more than 20 years of experience to the table.

He spent more than a decade taking Francotyp-Postalia - the German market leader and multi-channel provider for mail communication - through its major stages of growth. As a Quality Control Engineer and Head of Quality in the high-mix-low-volume manufacturing, Thomas proved his cross-disciplinary abilities by spearheading the company’s production transfer to Singapore where he set up and managed end-to-end business operations as Head of Production.

Known for his change management skills and commercial acumen, Thomas was further promoted to Managing Director Asia-Pacific where he restructured the regional distribution and turned the Singapore office into a direct sales and service branch. He understands the constant pressures manufacturers face to improve their operational performance and how the Internet-of-Things will benefit their business. Besides, he also utilises his profound engineering and industy know-how as technical specialist translator for the English - German language pair.

Thomas has been based in Singapore since 2008. He holds a Bachelor's Degree (Hons.) in Information and Communications Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin (Germany) and an MA from the University of Kelaniya. He is a trained Six-Sigma Black Belt, APICSAmerican Production and Inventory Control Society Certified Supply Chain Professional (CSCP) and Certified Internet-of-Things Professional (CIoTP).

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between IoT, Smart -, Advanced Manufacturing and Industry 4.0?

From the practical point of view, the differences are rather semantic. All address basically the same concept of enebaling assets along your value chain to participate in a digital network in order to exchange data and to extract actionable insights from them so that your stakeholders and automated systems are empowered to make quicker and better business decisions.

Is Industry 4.0 relevant for SMEs or rather for big companies?

Ask yourself: can your business, no matter how small it is, escape an environment shaped by pervasive computing? The digital transformation is affecting our lives everywhere and so it shapes the way we do and will do business. This trend poses an external thread to any business which needs to find appropriate answers to turn it into its bespoke competitive advantage. While big players are usually among the early adopters, small and medium enterprises have a competitive edge in being less complex and agiler to embrace new methods. Industry 4.0 is nothing your business can buy off-the-shelf but an iterative process of adopting your way of doing business to your customer's needs in an ever more digitalised world. It is, therefore, imperative to any business, big and small, to find the right answers in order to stay relevant and not to delay the learning curve involved.

With plenty of legacy production equipment on the shop floor, isn’t Industry 4.0 just a pipe dream?

It is the norm that the production equipment, deployed in today’s factories, lack the connectivity and level of automation we wish for implementing the concepts of Industry 4.0. Companies are invested in their assets and want to utilise them fully. They have made their past investment decisions based on a thought-out corporate strategy and it is vital to review this strategy and to remodel the operational and tactical approach first before any fancy implementation. The derived vision and mission will shape your future equipment investment mid-term and make you focus on current use-cases supporting your objectives. Legacy systems can be retrofitted with sensors, sometimes readily available, to help you solve the bottlenecks and pain points you have now while the organisation learns and takes the next step on the Industry 4.0 journey.

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