The synergy between IT and manufacturing production is constantly evolving, the challenges imposed by globalization are already overcome and open the way to new demanding scenarios. The real world of good and service designing meets virtual reality, with the increasingly consistent use of IT tools, also integrating with production automation.
Management will be handled through the analysis of large amounts of data arriving in real-time from several production areas, published on cloud and remotely accessible at any time via web. Energy will still be one of the fundamental parameters for defining production capacity and competitiveness on global market.
The adoption of PDCA method represents the first step towards Industry 4.0: the constant monitoring of data related to energy consumption and the comparison against standard benchmarks allow to easily detect critical issues and take corrective actions.