Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Industry 4.0: Team & Leadership Secrets

2 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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1:13

In this segment of the video, the speakers stress that successful Industry 4.0 initiatives in manufacturing require a cross‑functional team that includes IT, operations, quality, and key stakeholders such as directors who fund the projects. They argue that isolated efforts by a single engineer or project manager will likely fail because the customer’s concerns may be missed. Regular progress updates to stakeholders are essential to keep everyone aligned. The discussion then shifts to the importance of strong leadership—a champion, formal leader, or business owner—who can rally the organization around the digital transformation and ensure sustained momentum.

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we also say for every implementation, you should have cross-functional team. Don't just run by yourself and say, okay, I'm the engineer or I'm the project manager, I'm going to do this. You're going to fail because your customer is not part of your implementation. Sometimes you don't really know if you're answering their questions or their concerns. And I think we have one of the comments here, right, that says the teams that you need for this. You need IT, you need operations, you need quality. You also need your stakeholders. Your stakeholders are going to be the directors, the guys who are going to be paying the bills. You also need to give them periodic updates. You also need to let them know that, hey, this is what we're doing and this is the progress so far. So for you to be able to be successful in this space of manufacturing, you have to be able to carry everybody along.
It's quite a skill. And we talk a lot that, you know, it takes leadership. So whether it's It's a champion. It's a formal leader. It's a business owner. A lot of the companies, you'll have owners very active in the business. In other organizations, it's different, but you still need somebody that is a strong leader that the organization can rally around.