The industry, the labour 4.0

Since the discussion on the Industry 4.0 has been leaving the research laboratory and category workshops to occupy a place in the public debate – debate accelerated in Italy by the Calenda’s piano – this topic has relied on six keys of reading: technology (undoubtedly full of charm), policy (benchmark on the different national policies and discussion on the Italian delay), economic (reasoning on the business models), social (the effects on the labour market), organizational (review of the business management model and the same social enterprise concept), cultural (the education of young and old generations, the attitude towards the digital revolution).

So, after the narrative simplification of the first period, industry 4.0 has begun to reveal complexity and facets. The phenomenon is extremely complex, and requires multi-faceted and multidisciplinary treatment: alongside those who kept the attention on the centrality of technology – from which, however, every other piece depends – there are those who have also focused on the organizational innovation, which is for many the field within companies where the most important game is played. According to this line, the problem is not only to have good engineers and some very clever designers, but new organizational solutions able to learn, make collective experiments, make mistakes and correct themselves, quickly acquire new skills. Basically, the curvature of the theme in a social and organizational key, is not a secondary side, both because it concerns the most difficult company asset to handle (man) and because there are still no reference models of proven utility, maps and bearings for navigation in a corporate environment that is supposed different from the past, even if nobody really knows in what sense.

Ultimately, focusing attention on local improvements and impact management are typical approaches of the twentieth century, they have a sense linked to the characteristics of the technologies of the time (automated machinery for sequential work phases) and the related organizational systems (stable and structured, with codified tasks and hierarchical rigidity). However, if current markets require adaptability and intelligence to the productive system, the hybrid person-technology is central: the first must know the machines; the second be able to learn from people.

How does technology 4.0 actually work? It allows to face in a new way some nodes of the company organization: it tends to flow between departments and processing phases; reduces waste by fostering extreme logistics; it collects information from the process, reworks it in real time, reinserts it into the process, allowing changes in progress; anticipates design errors and bottlenecks thanks to process virtualization; it saves energy and space, designing workplaces differently from the past; “Re-enters” the contribution of man in the production mechanism, putting in place not only the skills of the worker, but his subjectivity, individuality and humanity. What effects on the company? Those who visit organizations that activate intelligent production models realize that the change does not follow pre-established rules. The nature and extent of the transformation depend on many factors: the history of the company, the size, the managerial culture, the market, the sector and the quality of human capital available.

Finally, how do governments behave and what policies do they put in place? Industry 4.0 must establish itself in Italy in a background made up of small, poorly capitalized and historically unaccustomed companies to invest in innovation. As made clear in the preconditions of the National Business Plan 4.0, the Italian industrial horizon is defined by obsolescence in the fleet, low quality investments and actions aimed at extending production capacity rather than recovering efficiency and productivity; unavailability of the appropriate connection for 70% of companies; reduced availability of skills in the STEM disciplines (14 graduates out of 1000) and poorly professional training; good research quality, but fragmented technology transfer infrastructures; strong know-how of manufacturing and quality of Made in Italy but lack of cultural propensity to digital (25a out of 28 EU countries in the monitor of the digital economy and society); few major industrial and ICT players able to drive the transformation of manufacturing, limited number of head of production chain able to coordinate the evolutionary process and integration of the value chains in the face of an industrial system based on SMEs that could benefit from the productivity jump. The pitiless description of a backwardness that also involves the aerospace sector, where the role of SMEs in the value chain is anything but secondary.

Extensive data on the cultural adaptation of Italian companies to the paradigm 4.0 are not available. The official data related to the success of tax incentives show an industrial world in which 4.0 essentially meant automation, but the field observations carried out by socio-economic research centers show different signals. The cases of companies active in mature and poor markets, for example in automotive components or in small metal parts, have multiplied (even though few), which have developed high-impact digital automation models, managed by virtual platforms for process regulation, capable to generate data that can be used to improve the process and review the products.

Each national plan is a child of the context in which it is born. The celebrated German platform Industrie 4.0, which already in 2016 declared that it involved 25% of national SMEs in the paradigm shift, and that it considered to integrate the IG Metal into the governance of the federal platform, can count on a political culture supported by medium-term pacts and stable policies as well as deeply financed at local level. In France, the Usine du Future project started in 2015 and firstly developed a national plan by selecting the strategic levers and the areas of intervention considered as qualifying for the French industry. Among these, wide space is given to the problem of the formation of human capital to the so-called open innovation model, which fosters the matching between companies and start-ups as a leverage to introduce disruptive innovation in companies too consolidated and traditionalist to mature innovation internally. In England, the High Value Manufacturing Catapult project, born in 2009 as a response to the global crisis and subsequently adapted, is an industrial policy that immediately had the aim of bringing the attention back to manufacturing, left on the margins for two decades. The plan is physically carried forward by a family of centers of excellence – partly public, partly private – coordinated by a holding company that guarantees the governance of the system and the common services. Catapult has changed the perception in the UK of the importance of manufacturing, and in place the foundations for considering industry 4.0 not only technology, but ability to use it.

 

Annalisa Magone