Equipping Brazilians for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
With the Fourth Industrial Revolution digitalizing factories worldwide, manufacturing workers are facing a shift in tasks. To help prepare Brazil’s manufacturing workforce for this transition, Nokia recently announced a partnership with SENAI-SP, Brazil’s National Service for Industrial Training, to create an Industry 4.0 model plant where employees can be empowered and hone their technical skills.
The lab, located in in São Paulo, will provide training and testing facilities to accelerate Industry 4.0 adoption in the country as the need for automation, AI and 5G adoption grows.
Using Nokia’s connectivity solutions, the lab will allow pilot testing and demos of new
solutions (i.e. wireless and local area networks) before they hit the market and support the future of Brazil’s economic growth amid this shift.
We wanted to learn more, so we posed questions to Wilson Cardoso, LAT chief solutions officer at Nokia. Take a look…
Smart Industry What's the motivation for this partnership?
Wilson: To bring expertise from SENAI with Industry 4.0 applied to verticals from environment, food and beverage, energy and biotechnology covering the transformation-process methodology, process design, machine refurbishment, digital process, integration, commissioning, acceptance and training from the industrial workforce.
With its 800,000 new students every year, SENAI laboratories are the perfect environment to create a scenario that can be experimented and modeled by students, experts, teachers, and professors before being applied in actual industry. With Nokia Digital Automation Cloud, a carrier-grade global digital-automation-service platform, SENAI will provide local, private connectivity solutions and a suite of applications for enterprises and verticals. It provides a reliable, secure, and high-performance private wireless network that is scalable according to need.
Smart Industry: How is the Brazilian/South American workforce adapting to digitalization compared to American/global workforces?
Wilson: The Brazilian workforce productivity is on average 4x lower than the workforce in the United States. As part of the Brazilian government’s efforts, 5G will play a big role in increasing productivity in all fields. Our partnership with SENAI goes exactly in this direction; to leverage the productivity, workforce training and development.
Smart Industry: What will the model plant produce?
Wilson: This is the beauty of the model plant. This is the plant of the future, so we are free to configure several production elements and produce everything, in theory. The plant of future is a building with walls, a roof and highly reliable indoor connectivity.
Smart Industry: What most excites you about this initiative?
Wilson: This initiative will enable every industry in Brazil, of any size, to start their journey into Industry 4.0 transformation, combined with the professional development of thousands of people each year.