Electricity and Control April 2025

Industry 4.0 + IIoT

For manufacturing companies, maintaining and growing the South African manufacturing sector involves navigating significant risks. Digital transformation is reshaping the sector, enhancing e‘iciency, reducing costs and improving product quality, and those that don’t keep up with digitalisation and digital integration in manufacturing operations will fall behind. A first step in digital transformation for manufacturers Neels van der Walt, Head of Department Sales and Business Development at Iritron

With Industry 4.0 tools, smart factory technologies, and an upskilled workforce, manufacturers are driving significant improvements in eŒiciency and sustainability.

A ccording to PwC’s South African Manufacturing Analysis 2024, released in October last year, the South African manufacturing sector is facing increasing pressure to change and adapt, particularly with regard to decarbonisation and the design of circular economy and sustainable products. Since the onset of the industrial revolution, basic manufacturing interaction has been human driven, oœen marred by errors with serious implications, such as downtime, cost overruns, wastage and losses in energy and other resources. With global competition forcing companies to find ways to optimise production operations and reduce non-value-adding activities, adopting Industry 4.0 tools and smart factory technologies is driving significant improvement in manufacturing eiciency and sustainability. By implementing Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems, for example, organisations can facilitate medium-term production planning and detailed scheduling, optimising production schedules and

balancing supply and demand. With the integration of advanced algorithms, APS systems can analyse and calculate achievable production schedules, enabling organisations to meet dynamic market demands. Many South African companies are shiœing from traditional time-consuming manufacturing practices to more agile, data-driven approaches that leverage real-time information and advanced analytics. This enhances responsiveness to customer demands by enabling quick adjustments to production schedules. As a result of experience gained in supporting multiple clients in diverse industries in South Africa with APS solutions, Iritron has found that APS systems are pivotal in assisting manufacturers to adapt to digital transformation. With an integrated approach to production planning and execution, the flexibility these solutions oer allows companies to meet last-minute requests without compromising overall planning control, and so to maintain their competitiveness. This is because it is easy to see quickly, via APS analysis, the impact of changes on the overall schedule, before the schedule is made available to the production plant. The advanced forecasting capabilities of APS provide for potential bottlenecks to be detected and managed, for lower

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6 Electricity + Control APRIL 2025