i4Plas: building industrial digital capability for plastics manufacturing

i4Plas, the Centre for the Digital Transformation of the Plastics Industry, was launched during ColombiaPlast 2026 by Acoplásticos, ICIPC and KERN IoP. The initiative brings together industry representation, applied research and industrial digitalisation to help companies adopt Industry 4.0 technologies in practice. Portafolio reported on the launch and the centre’s roadmap.

Building the capability to use industrial digital technologies

The plastics industry is adopting more connected machines, sensors, vision systems, robots, artificial intelligence, analytics and specialist software. The benefits of these investments for productivity, quality, energy consumption and responsiveness depend on how the technologies are implemented and used.

The central task is to develop the ability to apply them within production: define the problem, capture the appropriate variables, link them to production context, integrate information from different equipment and turn the data into decisions whose effects can be verified in the plant.

KERN IoP has emphasised this distinction because it matters to industrial competitiveness. A plant with modern equipment may still depend on manual consolidation, isolated data or retrospective analysis that arrives too late to explain a productivity loss. Our review of industrial digitalisation in Colombia and Latin America examines why industrial digital maturity requires capabilities beyond basic connectivity and technology acquisition.

Three complementary capabilities behind i4Plas

i4Plas brings together three organisations with different roles in the sector. Acoplásticos contributes industry coordination and knowledge of companies’ needs; the Instituto de Capacitación e Investigación del Plástico y del Caucho (ICIPC) brings expertise in applied research, materials, processes and technical assistance; and PM Tec Engineering, through its Industry 4.0 division, KERN IoP, contributes sensing, data acquisition, software, integration and analysis capabilities for industrial processes.

This combination matters because a plant’s digital transformation involves processing knowledge, industrial operations and information technology together. It requires an understanding of the process, technological infrastructure, data behaviour and the decisions made by the people responsible for production, maintenance, quality and energy.

What the centre aims to enable

The roadmap presented for i4Plas includes digital-maturity assessments, transformation roadmaps, technology demonstrations, industrial pilots, specialist training and application development in areas such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, digital twins, collaborative robotics, machine vision, energy analytics and additive manufacturing.

These tools become useful when applied to specific problems. A company may need to understand why a line is losing capacity, locate concentrated energy consumption, relate process conditions to quality results, reduce unplanned stoppages or determine the information required before automating a decision. The centre aims to provide an environment for investigating these questions, testing technologies and developing capabilities before scaling investment.

A perspective with relevance beyond Colombia

The challenges behind i4Plas extend across plants and countries. Plastics processing in Latin America needs to improve productivity and sustainability while adopting rapidly evolving technologies. A specialist environment combining process knowledge, experimentation and applied digitalisation can help companies learn how to use those technologies effectively in industrial operations.

For KERN IoP, participating as a founding member of i4Plas extends our work on industrial data with context. We want plant information to help people understand the process, make evidence-based decisions and verify whether an intervention improves the result.

---

Sources

ACOPLÁSTICOS – Asociación Colombiana de Industrias Plásticas. (2026, 29 September). La Industria 4.0 llega al sector plástico: lanzamiento de i4Plas durante ColombiaPlast 2026 [LinkedIn post]. LinkedIn.

ICIPC. (2026, 30 September). i4Plas, Centro para la Transformación Digital de la Industria Plástica [LinkedIn post]. LinkedIn.

Portafolio. (2026, 29 September). Industria plástica lanza el centro i4Plas para acelerar su modernización tecnológica. Portafolio.

Technical review: Dr.-Ing. Miguel Garzón · Technical direction, KERN IoP. October 2026.