COVID-19, meet Industry 4.0

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the November 2020 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

November 2020

Supply chains have been in the spotlight like never before over the last eight months. That hasn’t always been a good thing. The perception, reinforced by shortages of products essential to our daily lives, is that supply chains were not up to the task and failed. The reality, as argued by MIT’s Yossi Sheffi in his new book, “The New (Ab)Normal: Reshaping Business and Supply Chain Strategy Beyond COVID-19,” is that supply chains performed as designed—they did what we expected them to do.

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Eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ve absorbed the initial body blow and are preparing to ramp up operations in a radically changed world. You don’t need anyone to tell you yet again how challenging things are. What you do need are solutions.

• What practical steps can you take to safeguard the health of your employees?
• How can you continue to effectively serve customers and gain market share as you adapt to new demands and conditions?
• How can you make your business more resilient in the face of a prolonged pandemic or any future crises that could threaten your supply chains?

For manufacturers, some immediate answers to those questions can be found in Industry 4.0 technologies, which are already driving large leaps in productivity, and can now help the sector rebound from COVID-19 (see Figure 1).

Here are some ways manufacturers might practically apply new and established digital tech to operate safely through the pandemic, while moving toward more productive, profitable and resilient operations long term.

Problem: Maintain worker distancing

Solution: Wearable geofencing; cobots

Wrist-worn geofencing technologies (e.g., SafeZone) use proximity sensors to alert employees via haptic feedback whenever they are breaching social distancing guidelines. These devices also capture data to let you know who was in close contact with whom, so you can conduct contact tracing to quickly contain any COVID outbreak.

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