This survey of Industry 4.0 was conducted by the Italian Trade Commission (ITA) Chicago USA Office and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in November 2016 with over 325 companies based in the US taking part (2/3 of which currently use Italian machinery and technology in their production lines).

The report provides insight and analysis to determine the latest trends in Smart Manufacturing to determine how manufacturers are reacting to Industry 4.0. Questions included plans to adopt the connected factory on the shop floor in regards to technology acquisitions, upgrades and migrations to benchmark current awareness/understanding and the perceived ‘role’ of digital solutions, identify current adoptions and areas of focus.

Over the last decade, the evolution of the Internet of Things, Big Data and the desire for ever-increasing productivity has driven the smart manufacturing movement. Today, manufacturers can see and react to the performance of their machines and integrated systems with analytics in real time. They can enable machines to talk to one other, control operations remotely, predict challenges and even share live data with the supply chain. Advancements in cloud computing, as well as mobile and app technology, increasingly puts power into the users’ hands.

The survey is available online at the following link.

For further information on this initiative, please contact chicago [at] machinesitalia.org (subject: Machines%20Italia%20E-newsletter)