Nokia, a name which takes us to starting days of mobile telephony, still remains the second largest equipment manufacturer in the world after Ericsson. In spite of seeing growing competition and downs in mobile manufacturing industry Nokia still employs over 2,000 people. The strong R&D team of Nokia is ready to welcome the next generation evolution, 5G. With emergence of industry 4.0 and 5G, Nokia is ready to follow its legacy of R&D innovation focusing in research and products.
Nokia is building the factory of the future as explained by Erja Sankari, Head of Oulu Factory at Nokia. Industry 4.0 has marked its origin with Automation, Nokia base station factory is enriched with number of robots both for assembling the products and placing them at packages. “We’re industrializing our products, which means making them friendly to automated manufacturing,” Sankari say.
The simplification of the product design is the only part of this industrialization effort. In addition, Nokia is also focusing on Collaborative robots and number of ways to make robots operate in efficient and easy manner. As 5G standards are not yet finalized it will be exciting to see what other technologies lack when compared to 5G, due to 5G latency and speed some predictions are already made that its wireless connectivity will provide flexibility to moving equipment around and reconfiguring it in simpler when it doesn’t need a wired connection.
Today it takes three people to operate the Nokia factory, but over time the company hopes to achieve a ‘lights out’ facility, meaning one that requires no human operators whatsoever. To achieve this goal, it must take automation to the next level, where robots feed, manage, and reconfigure the robots.
