Industry 4.0 promised a lot; production value arrives when connectivity, compute, and change management meet. With 5G and modern IoT stacks, factories and logistics networks can finally close the loop between sensing and action. ETPA members can guide this journey from lab to line.
Define the business case first. Pick a bottleneck: unplanned downtime, scrap rates, energy waste, or safety incidents. Quantify baseline KPIs and commit to a measured improvement. Then design the minimal sensor set, edge compute footprint, and data model to support that goal.
5G’s strengths—uRLLC, network slicing, private deployments—shine in deterministic environments. Pair it with time-sensitive networking and edge inference for closed-loop control. Use standardized data semantics (OPC UA, Asset Administration Shell) so insights travel across machines and vendors.
Security and reliability matter more than flashy dashboards. Implement device identity, secure boot, patch pipelines, and micro-segmentation. Build for degraded modes: if connectivity blips, local control must continue safely. Observability should track latency, packet loss, model drift, and equipment health.
Scale through templates. Once a use case works at Plant A, capture infrastructure-as-code, data schemas, and process SOPs to roll out to Plants B-Z. Train local champions; success spreads peer-to-peer faster than top-down mandates. Budget for organizational change: shift technicians from reactive fixes to predictive maintenance, and align incentives around uptime and quality.
Ultimately, IoT + 5G is not about the number of sensors; it’s about closed-loop value. For ETPA members, your play is to make pilots boring, secure, and replicable—so production wins become inevitable.
