Industry4WRD is the official name given to the
Malaysian blueprint towards self-aligning with the advent of the Fourth
Industrial Revolution, and it was officially launched on the 31st October 2018.
As at today, the
23rd of February 2019, a full 115 days have elapsed and one should
reasonably ask as to what has been done apart from the carnival-kind of grand
officiating and publicity? Carefully read the official publication of
Industry4WRD, I have always felt doubts as to whether it is a plan for a smart
manufacturing ecosystem transformation or it is a mere brief version of another
Industrial Master Plan (IMP) as of we are now about coming to an end of the
Third Industrial Master Plan (2006 – 2020) as compared to the previous two
IMPs, namely the 1st IMP (1986 – 1995) and the 2nd IMP (1996 – 2005).
Whether or not Industry4WRD would encounter
the consequence like the National IoT Strategic Roadmap which was launched on
the 9th July 2015 is an interesting development to be observed. Ask around
industrial practitioners and government agencies, what had been delivered from
and who can still remember about the National IoT Strategic Roadmap? I bet you,
you will get extremely disappointing and frustrating answers.
Of course, Industry4WRD and the National IoT
Strategic Roadmap differ in the sense that first, the former was launched by
the prime minister, whereas the latter was launched by the minister of the then
MOSTI (Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation), and therefore they
carry definitely different weights, and second, the National IoT Strategic
Roadmap is a complete misconception of smartness in the IoT application and
misalignment with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The major obstacle that Malaysia has always
come across is the competency of execution. We can always have excellent
write-ups, wonderful presentations, bombastic figures, and expensive
publicities to create impression and awareness, but nothing else thereafter.
The remaining works will be left to those volunteers who felt obliged to
social-industrial acceleration works.
As a technopreneur as well as a close observer
of Made in China 2025, the Chinese version of Industry 4.0, since its public
release on the 19th May 2015, I have had a number of opportunities to discuss
with a few key figures and visit the smart manufacturing a.k.a. intelligent
manufacturing ecosystem test-sites.
The mode of Malaysia executes Industry4WRD is
apparently far less than adequate and appropriate, which could be summed up in
two key observations. First is the failure of the government to guide
manufacturing enterprises to transform themselves into smart manufacturing
capabilities. Second is the failure to give rise to industrial passion and
sense of urgency and cruciality.
Government plays indisputably vital roles to
lay the foundations. What are those foundations? Apart from public utilities,
infrastructures, HR capabilities, and implementation agencies as what usual
socioeconomic needs, those specifics to smart manufacturing transformation are
(1) Standards; (2) Assessment Model; (3) IT-OT Integration Efforts.
Standards – China and Germany have established
a government-to-government collaboration to formulate various standards to be
adopted in the smart manufacturing ecosystem. Doe SIRIM or other agencies do
working towards the same direction? Can these works be published to make known
to industrialists at large as what China has been doing thus far?
Assessment Model – Germany has its Industry
4.0 Maturity Model and China has its Intelligent Manufacturing Capability
Maturity Model. Although Industry4WRD comes together with Industry4WRD
Readiness Assessment Guideline, the 8-page documentary produces very limited
information to be used by the public. Unless MPC (Malaysia Productivity
Corporation) wants to maintain its as proprietary intellectual property to
generate profit when rendering consultancy, the said Guideline must be made
available to the public to its fullness and entirety. If not, it may be seen as
a form of malpractice taking into consideration that MPC is not a private
profit organization but a government agency, or else what MPC has is indeed a
mere 8-page documentary of Guideline.
IT-OT Integration Efforts – IT stands for
information technology and OT stands for operational technology. It is gravely
wrong to merely talk about IT in the smart manufacturing ecosystem, without
taking into account of OT. Simply put, OT is the use of computers to monitor or
alter the physical state of a system, such as the control system for a power
station or the control network for a rail system. Surprisingly and regrettably,
there is a complete absence of the OT in the Industry4WRD documentaries, which
in my opinion Industry4WRD is merely an ordinary industry development plan,
rather than a plan towards smart manufacturing transformation.
To this end, and to what I could best
envision, Industry4WRD would not produce many meaningful nor significant
outcomes if wrongs are not rectified immediately and industrial movement is not
in planning track. Business-as-usual can be expected if not worse.
