Since the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing processes have undergone several revolutions characterized by ever-greater automation. Today, the fourth industrial revolution, known as Industry 4.0, takes advantage of big data and machine learning to drive smart, highly automated processes. A pretty familiar concept.

Less well understood, but equally momentous, has been a parallel evolution in asset maintenance. Maintenance 1.0 relied on highly-trained specialists to visually inspect machinery. Maintenance 2.0 gave humans instrumentation to measure how equipment was running, while Maintenance 3.0 used real-time monitoring to understand the condition of an asset systematically and programmatically. Now with the Internet of Things (IoT) collecting sensor data, Maintenance 4.0 sees that data captured in a data lake repository, and algorithms and analytics applied to better predict when a given asset will fail, and how to correct the problem—preventing a potential foo ...  >>

Risk in pharmaceuticals is often associated with drug shortages: events that prevent patients getting the right medicines at the right time. In traditional supply chains, supply risk is typically managed through increased inventory. However, excessive inventory is unsustainable, and may conceal the variety of factor  >>