A Lean practitioner explains why Lean and Industry 4.0 work together: Lean cuts waste, Industry 4.0 adds automation and data. The crucial rule: fix your manual process first, or you'll just automate the mistakes.
You have a long background in lean, and I wanted to ask you, do you think lean and Industry 4.0 are complementary or maybe conflictual? What, what's your perspective on that?
No, I think they're very complementary. Lean is about producing value with the least amount of waste. And Industry 4.0 is a lot about automating things and reducing defects and having data that allows you to make great decisions and better decisions. So I think it's very complementary. My only caution in that, which I always told my teams, they always wanted to jump to automating something first, right? Is show me a manual process that works first so you're not automating waste. You don't want something spitting out garbage faster. That is not helpful.
