Industry 4.0 solutions: is software development indispensable?

Industry 4.0 is the fourth industrial revolution and encompasses various sectors including agriculture, construction, energy, industrial production, mobility, transport and logistics, and water supply. As of now, it is not possible to define exactly which sectors are included in this concept – so there are a lot of different definitions out there.

Sometimes industry 4.0 is referred to as Industry 3.0 or Industry 4.1 (with the first digit being added for “4”). But the latter makes it more difficult for people to understand what industry 4.0 is about. We will therefore not use the term Industry 3.0, but instead, stick to industry 4.0 as a common denominator for all its possible definitions.

The basic idea behind industry 4.0 is that manufacturers are becoming increasingly reliant on software and IT in all aspects of production, while at the same time they are developing new ways of cooperating with suppliers, customers, and other actors from the value chain (what I would call “service providers”) to make their processes more efficient by leveraging the ever-increasing computing power and connections in our digital world.