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26 SMT Magazine • March 2017 In the same way that we are not all driving the same car, have the same phones, or use the same SMT equipment in our factories, we are unlikely to all end up using a single smart solu- tion or IoT technology. At the car rental coun- ter, you can be confident that you will be able to drive whatever car is available; and in the same way, you should expect all of your factory tech- nology to be interoperable. Choosing the best tool for the job differentiates the business and enhances competitiveness. Decisions on auto- mation, IoT technologies, and software com- puterizations need to be based on merit because the choices vary considerably. Interoperability is the key for future-proofing, and this is not the time to be waiting for ultimate decisions while others are moving forward. Humans–Cannot Live Without Them Even in the wildest imagination of future smart factories, the reality is that humans re- main in charge. We are the ones who will still make the fundamental decisions and choices about which technologies to use. We will have to wait I expect until Industry 5.0 to see fac- tories that design, make, and configure them- selves. That scenario may not be too far away once 3D printing technology really starts to evolve; but for the foreseeable future, Industry 4.0, which represents the computerized opera- tion of the factory full of automated processes, is dependent on people. Humans are quite variable entities. In spite of there being billions of us, we rarely see two people who look the same or dress the same. Be- cause of this "human need" for differentiation, there are many variants in all of the stuff that we buy. For example, each car model can have thousands of variants for something that is just a mechanism for moving the fairly standard hu- man form from one location to another. A dis- tant potential relative of mine once thought by Michael Ford MENTOR GRAPHICS CORP. One Size Fits All? THE ESSENTIAL PIONEER'S SURVIVAL GUIDE