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An industrial ecosystem is known to include all the major players from value chain operating systems, small start-ups to large companies, academic to the research field, service providers to suppliers.
The different sectors operating with industrial ecosystems are:-
- Tourism
- Aerospace & Defence
- Retail
- Digital
- Creative & Cultural industries
- Textiles
- Proximity & Social Economy
- Construction
- Energy-intensive industries
- Electronics
- Agri-Food
- Renewable Energy
- Mobility, Transport & Automotive
- Health
The major characteristics identified in an industrial ecosystem are:-
- Trading of product material.
- Trading of material based on limited availability.
- Product material trading system organized.
- Co-located organisation.
- Light industrial activity.
- Cross-sector collection diversified in SMEs.
- Environmental friendly neighbours and construction.
- Renewable energy (solar, wind, and biomass) and others.
Now in the case of Industry 4.0. The impact of digitalization on the industrial ecosystem with a data center to be in continuous exchange from each category are:-
- Support and maintenance
- Support from remote and on-site helping in decreasing the machine downtime.
- Faults are prevented due to predictive maintenance to create new revenue streams.
- Analysis of real-time data to enable improvements in both processes and machine design.
- End users
- Products are personalized.
- Timely delivery.
- Lower prices.
- OEMs
- Value creation with new revenue streams and machine design is improved.
- Pay per use: charge for time use.
- Pay per outcome: charge per unit produced.
- Supply chain
- Connected
- Real-time information flow
- Just-in-time deliveries, reducing the inventories.
In Manufacturing plants, the impacts can be seen as:-
- Lower costs due to higher efficiencies, machine downtime is low, yield is higher and production is fast.
- All pieces of information are harnessed by intelligent devices from existing machine component sensors.
- Transfers of real-time data between all machines.
- Machines are centralized and remotely controlled with full and semi-autonomous systems.
Source:- Statista (In-depth Industry 4.0), Industry ecosystems.