Table of contents
More about Industry 4.0
IT people in companies primarily take care of one thing: IT. Workplaces, servers or cloud services should provide office workers with the best possible working conditions. For many IT teams in industry, the field of activity has so far ended with the administrative staff, production remains a blind spot. At the same time, advances in this area often end in conflict. But why is that and how can it be solved?
Maik Wienstroer
Maik Wienströer is CISO of heristo ag and is responsible for the IT security of the entire group of companies. At http://maik-wienstroeer.de/ he also deals with the topics of IT sourcing, strategy and security.
In many minds, the old idea of a machine still prevails: a large, purely mechanical device, built and maintained by technical specialists. This view is outdated, and automation has long since found its way into the machine sector. The first steps were programmable logic controllers (PLC), which have many analogies to computers and can be programmed with logic modules.
Since then, the control has been increasingly centralized under the keyword Industry 4.0 and the PLC is controlled by central systems (see box). The integration of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) further blurs the boundaries between IT and the operational technology (OT) responsible for production. They enable more complex processes that go beyond controlling the machines. This includes permanent, data-driven process optimization to counter increasing price pressure, or predictive maintenance of the systems to prevent failures.
