Jawahar Kotturu on Education in Industry 4.0

A Journey Through Time

The Timeless Clock is a story about two immortal people named Romeo and Juliet. And their son, Juleo. Not to be confused with Shakespeare’s characters. That was fictional. Mine is real. Shakespeare’s died. Ours live on.

Our story starts in the early 17^th century where Romeo and Juliet are a couple who live in a village called Verona, in the countryside. They had gone through a huge struggle in their youth and as you will see throughout this story their struggles continued through the centuries, till at last in 2020 they found some peace, despite the pandemic. Apparently among the few who did well.

In Verona, work and social life were mixed, as families lived on small plots of land, growing crops mostly for home consumption. Children learned to milk cows, churn butter, and tend to farm animals. This traditional agrarian lifestyle and outlook was very typical of those times. People were happy surrounded by family and friends. Nice quiet life. But poverty was everywhere and there really was no access to the world outside. You lived life day to day. This was the agrarian society or era.

As time progressed so did the country where Verona was situated. New towns emerged which were set apart from the old system in the countryside. They were no longer tied to the land and merchants and craftspeople found a new livelihood in producing handcrafted goods in workshops and trading their labour for money. Most of these crafts—such as cloth weaving, masonry, and furniture making—were very labour intensive, so production was low and slow by today’s standards. Still, cities began to thrive as markets and demand for crafts and agricultural goods increased.

Since workers in the city were paid more than ones in the country, Romeo and Juliet moved to the city. There they experienced a new world. A world of machines which produced more than humans, in shorter times. Humans were trained to use those machines and paid three times than what labour was. So, Romeo got trained and started working on a machine in a factory. Once a year they both took a trip to their village to visit family and friends. Though they were very lonely in the city, but they earned much more. Welcome to the 1^st Industrial revolution. The movement from an Agriculture based economy to the start of an industrial economy.

As time went on, the second industrial revolution took place. Masses of people moved to the Industrial locations, primarily in search of employment in the country's burgeoning industries. Transportation was revolutionized by the use of railroads which enabled low-cost and mass transportation. This was supported by more inventions like the telegraph and the telephone, which was good news for Romeo and Juliet. They could now keep in touch with friends and family. Then came Airplanes. Now they could visit more often. A very happy state of affairs indeed. With more automation, mass production began, needing more specialized skills than Romeo had. So, Romeo and Juliet went and joined an internship and started training to become machine operators. Better pay, better life.

One day, Romeo read about computers. How they would change the world. So, he went and got Juliet an internship in a computer company where she learned about things like data, information, processing etc. Soon she became quite proficient and got a full-time job. Her salary doubled. Romeo meanwhile trained to become a pilot. His Salary doubled too.

They were now in what economists called the 3^rd industrial revolution. The age of digitalization. They had a good life. Now from Mon to Friday they would work very hard and on Saturday and Sunday they relaxed, called their family in Verona and kept in touch. Meanwhile, Juliet’s company converted the telephone to a handheld with wireless. They called it a mobile phone. One set was given to Juliet to try out as well. She loved it. She could carry it about where she went and could call anyone whenever she liked. They called it the concept of anytime anywhere communication. She welcomed the 3^rd Industrial revolution since it changed her life, providing so many facilities enabled by technology.  

So much happened in this 3^rd revolution. ARPANET or The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network became the basis for the Internet. As the internet grew and became advanced and powerful, so did Juliet, now enabled with information. After all, information is power.

Over the next few years, a millennium was crossed, technology grew, the internet grew from one gen to the next, computers got extremely intelligent, now doing the boring repetitive work of humans. They became “assistants” to human needs. The handheld mobile phone caught the fancy of the world and showed huge developments. Another decade down, you didn’t need to make a call to keep in touch. You simply sent a message. In a while you got a reply. And then, wonder of wonders. They developed instant messaging. You could communicate in real time.

Then somewhere humans started feeling the need for refined and more powerful automation in factories. The ground for the 4^th Industrial revolution was laid.

And then it hit us. Technology so advanced that Juliet had a fake human, they called it a robot, doing her housework, cleaning her dishes and so on. She hoped it could one day do her office work as well so that all she had to do was check if it was doing it properly and correctly. She was always connected to her robot, through her mobile phone, now made very smart with technology, software etc. She could do anything, go anywhere and all she needed was her mobile phone or smartphone as it was now called, to keep in touch with her robot and know what was going on, manage her home electricals etc. Romeo meanwhile became the head of technical support for the airline he worked for. He too was connected to his team 24X7. Suddenly his company announced that they had introduced machines which would diagnose problems and inform Romeo of what needed to be done. He did not have to perform those boring inspections anymore. All he had to do was re-train himself to handle this new job. He did and was given a promotion too.

Juliet was transferred to her company’s factory as they were facing a problem. The challenge was that there were too many orders, mostly of different types and the company was losing customers and profits since they could not keep up with the demand. Juliet was tasked with the job of completely transforming the factory and the business to take care of this new phenomenon.

She immediately realized that the first step would be to understand what potential customers, we call them prospects, actually wanted and dreamed of. So, she hired some specialists called data analysts and data scientists who gleaned prospect information and conversations from the internet, social media etc and analysed them and created groups of likeminded prospects, into what she called consumer pools. She was now able to predict demand based on which her marketing department could design products and services which consumers actually wanted.

Next, she bought something called 3 D printers, which could quickly create prototypes of products and which, if proven faultless, became the basis for production. Next, she bought very advanced production machines which could be remotely programmed, within minutes to produce designs of different consumer pools. Her factory managers were connected to these new machines 24X7 to manage and control the production. All three shifts.

She then upgraded her support department with robots and computers who could proactively offer and manage support to their customers. The computers constantly grew their own intelligence by adding customer experiences and feedback of the past based on which they were able to resolve more and more customer issues day by day.

Her efforts paid off. The company regained their position as no 1 in the industry. She was rewarded handsomely.

Romeo and Juliet’s story is not fictional. This is how life evolved across the different industrial revolutions. Today as we have entered into the 4^th revolution, our stories are very similar. But as you all may have noticed, both Romeo and Juliet survived each revolution. The common thread was they were always training and retraining as change drove them from one revolution to the next. And that’s how, we too, can overcome what appear to be challenges of Industry 4.0 as we see them today.

Now, about Juleo. He is currently in a top University and is working on Industry 5.0 which is about robots making humans work better and faster. He tells his parents he is reversing their roles very soon.

Today, in whatever professional stream we are in, whether marketing, engineering, sales or human resource or admin., we are all being touched by industry 4.0. Its not the factory alone. As we saw in Romeo and Juliet’s case, Industry 4.0 touched the factory, marketing, sales and support. It maybe pervasive for many of us, but it is not without a key. And that key is knowledge. Training and retraining. Learning and unlearning and then learning again.