Are these Industry 4.0 technologies real innovations, or just hype?
Tom Annett, Director of Engineering and Automation Controls and Power at Conagra Brands, shares his thoughts on trending Industry 4.0 technologies in this lightning round of questions, from digital twins to the metaverse for manufacturing.
For more insights from Annett on the real impact of Industry 4.0 on processing operations, watch the full interview at ProFood World.
Bryan Griffen: All right. Well, it's time for my favorite part of the show. So it's the lightning round. So this goes quick. The idea is I'm going to throw out a buzzword and you're going to tell me is it hype, is it real or is it, oh, let's wait and see. All right, so we're going to go through this, first one: digital twin.
Tom Annett: Digital twin. Well, I would say it depends on the industry and project. It has a place, and as I mentioned before, we've actually utilized it, but it can be expensive and time consuming. And in the food industry, things move very fast.
So, how do you take the time to actually use a digital twin in the food industry without slowing down the process of the changes that you're going to make anyhow. So it makes more sense today for high-capital intensive type efforts to do things like improve vertical startups for those big projects. That's what I see.
Bryan Griffen: Next one, machine learning.
Tom Annett: Well, I think it's real. First of all, I think it's real, but it needs to be applied to applications in which significant improvements are anticipated. It is another expensive proposition, but it also requires, when you start thinking about this, it also requires retraining and acceptance of plant for operators and personnel to make the adjustments that may be counterintuitive. So an operator may have been doing this for 15, 20 years, and that's what they're used to, and now I've got this machine learning application telling them to do something different. And it might be right. I'm not saying everything that AI and machine learning does is correct, but it may be right. But if you don't do that, it's impossible to know. And so you have to get some buy-in from the operators to be able to do that.
Bryan Griffen: Yep. All right. Here's a fun one. The metaverse for manufacturing.
Tom Annett: Oh boy. I'm going to say it's probably real. I think it's aspirational for many manufacturers due to the cost and the education and the ROI. I don't want to say this, but I've been around for a long time. I'm an advanced age and I'm going, "ah, we'll see how this one rolls out." Right? I could be totally wrong and it's going to be the greatest thing since sliced pie, right? But we'll see.
