The vision of the factory of the future is one in which many things become much easier—tracking works-in-progress, performing comprehensive inspections and responding flexibly to changes in consumer demand. That being said, the process of building an Industry 4.0 facility is anything but easy.
One of the biggest challenges is the need to integrate a variety of systems from different suppliers. Industry 4.0 requires manufacturers to make everything work seamlessly together so that data will be available from all subsystems, including robots, machine vision systems, traceability systems, and so forth.
These subsystems typically have widely varying interfaces and they don’t always work as expected. Since there are different development environments for each OEM, companies need to hire experts for each environment. This becomes both time-consuming and expensive.
What if there was no longer a need to make all these different systems work together? What if there was a single environment that could take care of all configuration, programming, simulation, and monitoring needsfrom a simple interface?
The power of a single platform
With a single software development environment, manufacturers can achieve Industry 4.0 levels of integration faster with fewer complications. This goal is at the heart of all of Omron’s automation solutions, which give customers easier control across different technologies—including PLCs, vision and robotics—using a single software interface.