Your manufacturing company likely has business goals which include growing revenue, margins, and profits, as well as beating out the competition.

In today’s market, those goals are increasingly difficult to achieve.  Companies must continue to become more efficient, increase output, work for more demanding customers, work under increasing regulations, all the while continuing to earn current or better margins, and profits.

In the past, installing ERP systems or using Lean and Six Sigma frameworks was enough to improve the business. Many businesses can still benefit from those kinds of efforts. However, more and more those efforts aren’t enough to get the required efficiencies, production, and competitive differentiation.

The Internet of Things, which is a set of technologies put together into a system to convert data into useful information, is the next solution for enabling a business to accomplish its goals.  Here are a few ways IoT becomes the next solution:

1. Digging Deeper: ERP and MES (Manufacturing Execution System) systems are set up to provide data down to a certain level of detail for manufacturing processes. That used to be enough for companies to make major improvements in production efficiencies. However, IoT can provide data that is another level or two deeper. It can, among other tasks, provide data about conditions inside the equipment. That data can be used to understand how close the machine is to its effective operational limits, in addition to providing production output and related data.
2. More Uptime: The internal data can also be used to provide information on the condition of machines and even predict if and when they might break down. This allows maintenance and service technicians to fix the machines before major issues occur and keep them up and running longer, thereby increasing OEE (Optimal Equipment Effectiveness).
3. Sharing Data: The information that comes from an IoT system about production and equipment conditions can be shared beyond the manufacturing plant floor. Equipment often has an HMI (Human Machine Interface), or a screen from which users can view status information. However, that data is often not available outside of the shop floor. Utilizing the “Internet” portion of the Internet of Things allows maintenance technicians, management, and business leaders to see important data as needed.

Once the IoT system is in place, people across the organization can use the deeper, more useful data from equipment, manufacturing processes, and other areas of the business to drive decisions and actions. This is where the data becomes valuable information, and thereby becomes the differentiator in moving the business to the next level of growth in revenue, margins, profit, and also in competitive advantage.

These Industrial IoT systems give you access to data that has never been available before. We now have the ability to pull a large amount of new data from machines instantly. This all happens in real-time and is a game-changer for the manufacturing industry. Instead of tending to a machine that went down, diagnosing the problem, and trying to determine what you need to fix it; You can let your manufacturing IoT system pull the data you need to prevent this problem before it happens, or if something does break, you now have all of the information to determine the cause a lot faster. This also helps you understand your machines better, if you can see the data and watch everything that is going on inside your equipment, you will be able to run an efficient plant while making confident data-driven decisions.

If you have any questions at all, feel free to Contact us for more information. If you enjoyed or found some insightful information in this article, check out our blog, we have many more IIoT based articles to help you take your business to the next level.

In our post on Four Ways to Create Value with IoT, we discussed at the end the fact that making products better and making better products has a bigger impact on profit. And most companies want the biggest possible impact on profit.

So, – is making better products the place to start? No.

Why? Because it’s a difficult and complicated process. It’s best to start simple and grow into the more complex and impactful benefits of IoT.

It’s easier to wire up equipment with only a few sensors (or use existing sensors) and pull a limited amount of data and to focus on simpler tasks…improving asset utilization and optimization.

You can start with either improving maintenance or operating your equipment better. This requires less data, less analysis, and smaller changes in the product and company processes and culture when compared to the amounts of data and company changes required for innovation and invention.

Let’s take an electric motor as an example. Let’s say you manufacture these motors and sell them to customers. It’d be wonderful to start inventing new types of motors. However, you would need a lot of data about all aspects of how the motor is run, the environment in which it’s used, and the customer’s business. You would also need the capability and team to analyze that data to come up with new ideas. That sounds complicated.

Let’s compare that to adding a vibration sensor to the barring housing and a temperature sensor to the body of the motor. We should start by doing this for a single motor in our test or service shop. By adding “slap and stick” sensors retrofitted onto an existing motor, we’re already making the process simpler because we’re not having to reengineer any aspect of the motor.

Now let’s set up a gateway, pull it into an off-the-shelf IoT software platform to get the data from the motor, collect the data, and monitor the data. Are we able to see what normal conditions look like? Can we run the machine enough such that it starts to exhibit the behaviors we often see in the field such as vibrations from a barring that isn’t lubricated? What do those signals look like? Depending on the IoT software platform and related analytics tools we’re using, we might be able to relatively easily define some algorithms that can identify normal and specific abnormal behaviors. [KP1]  Then, the IoT platform allows us to set alerts to trigger the need for a service event. If we have this working well enough, then we can start to retrofit some motors in the field at a few customers’ sites. We can then continually improve the analytics, business activities, and decisions that come from the analytics, and business value from the whole setup.

Once the value is proven, then it’s time to move forward to execute other projects in this IoT journey which can drive down more costs and generate more revenue. Next might be adding the sensors to the motor during manufacture, providing data to our company and to customers to enable more efficient operations of the equipment. Eventually, the company can move to innovation and invention which require a lot more work and internal capabilities to realize value.

Keep in mind starting with maintenance should be accompanied by a review of your current equipment maintenance records, the performance of your equipment, and maintenance culture and practices. We can put you in contact with people and companies that perform these assessments and provide very valuable recommendations and follow-on services.

If you have any questions on how to start the IoT journey, or on maintenance and reliability best practices please call us, we’ll be happy to chat. We can help evaluate if an IoT journey makes sense. Additionally, we have many contacts in the maintenance and reliability community through our trusted partners and from our heavy participation in SMRP (Society for Maintenance and Reliability, smrp.org).