Toronto, Ontario – The fourth industrial revolution is upon us and optimizing your business to keep up isn’t as far out of reach as one might think, according to a pair of aftermarket experts from Ricardo Strategic Consulting.
During the second of AAPEX’s weekly October webinars, Aneesh Padalkar and Dan Foster gave their insight into how shop owners can streamline their business to be able to take full advantage of an increasingly interconnected and digitized repair process, during a webinar on Tuesday.
The key, according to Padalkar and Foster, is evaluating your supply chain from the ground up and implementing solutions that help convert your process from being reactionary to predictive.
A marker of this fourth industrial revolution that the pair point to is the instantaneous nature of interconnected systems — the ability to have a constant report of a vehicle’s condition and adjust to parts demands, free from the latency of reactionary supply chains.
Things such as big data collection, cloud computing and 3D scanning are possible solutions to the goal of being able to make accurate predictions on a vehicle throughout its entire lifespan.
Data collection can help manufacturers forecast aftermarket demands, in tandem with cloud computing. As well, 3D scanning and printing is a proven asset to the process of prototyping and early-stage testing as it allows challenges to be quickly identified early in the production process.
Combining these vehicle-specific advancements with strides made in the world of smart factories is crucial, according to Padalkar and Foster.
Businesses should try to find ways to automate more rudimentary tasks like basic drilling work or storage. As well, VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) solutions are becoming increasingly more accessible and effective to businesses as training tools.
Allowing employees to train using VR programs is a safer, cheaper and more scalable method for some aspects of training and is being adopted by a number of OEMs to cut costs of having in-person sessions, as well as eliminating the risk of injury in the process.
According to Padalkar and Foster, however, part of the onus is on cybersecurity developers to catch up with the current automotive environment so that these revolutionary changes can be made with consumer safety and privacy as top priorities.
