Trade Journals for the Concrete Industry

Articles in this series about Industry 4.0 have shown how precast concrete production facilities can draw step by step closer to the next stage of the industrial revolution. In this process, vision must always be measured against practical relevance and economic efficiency. One important objective with Industry 4.0 is production customisation. Times, in which manufacturing companies produced, stored and then sold off large numbers of the same product, should be a thing of the past. Instead, an increasing number of products are being manufactured to individual, customer specifications – right up to lot size 1. The automobile industry is often used as a role model. Yet it is often forgotten that customised production has already been practised in precast concrete component engineering for more than three decades. The following article describes developments in this time period and identifies further potential for optimisation.