Venkata Charan Kantumuchu

Global Quality Director, Electrex Inc., Edmond, OK, USA

Venkata Charan Kantumuchu is a Global Quality Director at Electrex Inc. and leads a team of more than 100 quality personnel including managers, supervisors, engineers and technicians. He has more than 10 years of professional experience in quality. He has a bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering and a master's degree in manufacturing and business administration. He has been a member of the American Society for Quality and the Society for Manufacturing Engineers since 2012. He has served in various quality leadership roles in many manufacturing companies. He has worked in the automotive, electrical, packaging, and wireless communication industries. He has been serving as the Chair and Chair-Elect for SME, Oklahoma City Chapter since 2015 and has also served in various capacities including Chair for Voice of the Customer and Chair for Audit at Oklahoma City ASQ chapter. He is currently volunteering as the Lead Quality documentation officer for a nonprofit organization (helpfulengineering.org) that is striving to make affordable ventilators and working on projects like drone delivery of medical supplies for rural villages in India. He has coached several students and employees of the companies he worked for, on the applications of Lean Manufacturing, and he has also been part of the SME mentor program since 2018 helping students with their career questions. He has been recently awarded the “Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer” by the society of manufacturing engineers (SME) for the year 2022.

Benefits of Incorporating Industry 4.0 to Lean Six Sigma

The purpose of this presentation is to establish the relation between Industry 4.0 and Lean Six Sigma. The goal is to highlight the various benefits that may be realized by employing technological advancements such as the ones seen in Industry 4.0 like automation, IoT and the use of AI to improve efficiencies and reduce wastes, which is the primary objective of lean six sigma. In the presentation we will discuss both the pros and cons of Industry 4.0 and how Industry 5.0 may overcome any of these shortcomings. This discussion will encompass both manufacturing and service industries. This presentation will cover the benefits such as new opportunities created for skilled labor, reduced wastes such as scrap, rework and internal failures. With more consistent processes, reliability of the products could be not only be improved but also predicted more accurately. This could lead to cost reduction and the ability to pass those cost savings to the end users. On the other hand, there are drawbacks as well, such as the unemployment that Industry 4.0 could create by replacing human labor with robots, which many a times are autonomous and would need minimum human intervention. Other disadvantages may include sustainability issues that would be covered in the presentation. At the end of this presentation, the participants should be able to understand how implementation of AI could benefit their organizations and also make the decision whether this would right for their organizations.