Miller Magazine Issue: 123 March 2020

58 COVER STORY MILLER / MARCH 2020 From a human resources point of view, this will make the low skilled workers redundant, but will also require a lot of highly skilled workers, with expertise in mechatron- ics, that simply haven’t been trained yet. Our technical schools will be more important than ever because they will have to educate the legions of young men and women on skills that almost didn’t exist 40 years ago. It looks a bit scary, but the automobile launched a similar revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, and yet everyone man- aged to get his car fixed. Programming is easy. You can learn it by yourself, at home, for free. But mechatronics, the fusion of mechan- ics, electronics, and programming at a small scale, requires specialized and expensive equipment. It demands learning by trial and error using materials that are expensive, and not just code. It is up to trade unions and business unions to promote new educational programs that will prepare the workers of the future. And by future, I mean next year, or maybe six months. Big data is, basically, knowing as much as possible about everything, all the time, and creating models with that information. It is in vogue in everything related to social networks, dealing with the tracking of human be- havior, in order to sell us more junk, but it can also be applied to grains. Imagine that you could track every water drop in a rain, you could discover patterns in it, and find out how the wind affects them, and the sun, and the nearby buildings. Of course, it is impossible and that is why engineers like myself deal only with approx- imates, and never on exact values. The uncertainties, compounded, lead to a huge margin of error. Howev- er, we do track (for example) batches of grain, and (as technology advances) we may track smaller and smaller packages. Then we will be able to find out which silo had the water leaks that got the grain rotten, which super- visor was sleeping and dried the grain too much, how long the truck takes to arrive in Porto Alegre, and much more. A consequence of this is that we will be able to implement Just In Time (JIT – Toyota) in many points of the grain value chain. If a miller can trust the numbers of the grain delivery time, he can buy only what’s needed at a specific time, and not 50.000 tons for the whole year. The money spent on inventory will fall dramatically, making millers more financially sound. The same applies to the output. Major distributors, supermarkets, import- ers, will be able to handle their supply chain better, re- sulting in savings for everyone. Big data systems tend to be huge, not something that you can implement in an old desktop computer. This de- mand in resources has encouraged the growth of another characteristic of Industry 4.0, which is Cloud Computing . It means that, instead of processing the information in a local computer, to service the local processes, you do it on specialized servers that connect to all your machin- ery and other systems. Being Industry 4.0 doesn’t mean that you rent foreign servers. You could use what is called Edge Computing and achieve the same results. However, in any case, they have to be connected to the internet, and not just the local Profibus network. All your systems have to be connected (maybe not directly) to your servers through the internet. That is what makes them “cloud”. Generally, they really are rented servers, because the spe- cialized data centers tend to be cheaper and more effi- cient than your own, but that is not mandatory. Summarizing, Industry 4.0 is not a new set of technol- ogies, but instead a new philosophy for the integration of technologies that have been around for decades. It means unlocking the whole potential of computers, instead of using them as humans. Have you ever seen someone use a pocket calculator to make the calculations in an Excel file instead of just using the Excel functions, using the spreadsheet only to make numbers look pretty? Well, for decades we have been that guy. Now we are finally com- mitting to taking an Excel course.