Industry 4.0 - AllAboutLean.com

The Van of Nerds in France—Aircraft Engines and Parts

November 12, 2025December 13, 2022 by Christoph Roser

This post looks at more plants we visited on our Van of Nerds tour in France in 2022. The focus this time is the aircraft industry, in particularly the engines. We visited a major maker of aircraft engines, or their nacelles and thrust reversers to be more precise, Safran in Le Havre. But we also visited two suppliers for engine components. LISI specializes in high-performance bolts and screws for aircraft, but also has some highly advanced digital displays on their shop floor. JPB makes well-designed inspection ports for aircraft engines, for which they developed some really clever digital solutions, which they now also provide to others. It was definitely a set of highly interesting visits. Let me show you!

The Van of Nerds in France—Research Laboratories

August 21, 2025December 6, 2022 by Christoph Roser

As part of our Van of Nerds tour through France, we also visited two research laboratories. While not shop floors, these are the places to experiment with new technologies.

The Van of Nerds in France—Overview and Aircrafts

October 31, 2025November 29, 2022 by Christoph Roser

In 2019 I organized an Industry 4.0 tour through southern Germany for a few friends. We called this the “Van of Nerds,” and you can read all about it in a series of blog posts starting here. The participants liked the van trip so much that we wanted to repeat this experience… and then came COVID. We held two online Van of Nerds mini-conferences (organized by our Nerd Torbjörn Netland), and finally, on September 5–9, 2022, we were able to take another real-world tour with our van of nerds, this time in France. The tour was organized thanks to nerds Franck Vermet and Michel Baudin.

How IKEA Uses Drones for Inventory Management

August 21, 2025July 19, 2022 by Christoph Roser

In my last post I went a bit into the theory of where drones in manufacturing may be applicable. They are not really for transport, but there is a possibility to use drones to gather data – provided you don’t need an expensive pilot and there are preferably no workers around on which a drone could crash. In this post I would like to show you the use of drones at IKEA. This is pretty much the only case I know that is not a mere trial, test, showcase, or example, but an actual beneficial implementation that receives a wide roll-out, with dozens of warehouses and stores either already having drones or planned to receive drones soon. Many thanks to Omid Maghazei for the information and details, see source below.

Drones in Manufacturing

August 21, 2025July 12, 2022 by Christoph Roser

A discussion of fancy new technology would be incomplete without mentioning drones. A simple Google search for “drone and manufacturing” returns around 72 million results. There is definitely a lot of buzz on drones and manufacturing. However, you probably have not yet seen a drone in manufacturing. This is because there are indeed very few cases of drones in manufacturing, and most of them are trial runs that never make it into regular production. Let’s have a look at what this is all about!

The Modern Way to Buy Screws

November 18, 2025May 24, 2022 by Christoph Roser

Screws, or more generally fasteners, are a main staple in most industries. Recently I visited a factory and saw a nice way to automate the procurement of screws and other fasteners. This Industry 4.0 solution is part of a vendor-managed inventory (VMI), where you not only buy the screw, but also the service of always having enough screws, and let the vendor manage the hassle of making sure there are enough screws. I found the example in this factory quite neat, and hence decided to tell you about it. Let me show you.

The Problem of Industry 4.0: Data! – Part 2

August 21, 2025May 17, 2022 by Christoph Roser

In my last post I started to look at the difficulties of handling data in Industry 4.0. I looked especially at the complexity and the often underestimated problem of merging data from different sources or machines. This second post of this two-post series finishes up this topic and will look at the also important and often underestimated task of cleaning up the data.

The Problem of Industry 4.0: Data! – Part 1

August 21, 2025May 10, 2022 by Christoph Roser

Industry 4.0 is still a hot topic, even over ten years after the term was coined. Unfortunately, very often I find it to be much more hype than content. The examples where it actually worked well are few and far between, and the examples where not much was hyped as groundbreaking are way too frequent. In my view, a large problem of Industry 4.0 is the data, especially the data structure and the problems with analyzing the data. Hence, (yet another) short series of post warning on the difficulties of Industry 4.0 with a focus on the data.