Where to Start and what is Industrial IOT?
INTRO TO INDUSTRIAL IOT/DATA-DRIVEN MANUFACTURING
Data-Driven Manufacturing/Industrial IoT is making decisions on manufacturing based on facts, not guesses and opinions. This creates the capability to make decisions based on the combination of three concepts.
What is Data Driven Culture?
A Data Driven culture is a company that provides one version of the truth of its data with everyone, the people are trained and empowered to find problems in the company, analyze the related data, make decisions, and most importantly take valuable action to solve the challenges. Companies with a Data Driven culture typically beat out companies that don’t in their markets.
Having a Data Driven Culture requires two things:
- A positive, progressive, problem-solving culture within the people: This culture starts with leadership driving the company forward, being open minded about how to improve, and empowering people to take valuable actions.
- A positive culture around data: The people also need to understand data at a basic level have access to true, accurate, single-version-of-the-truth data, empowered to use it, and interested in using the data for the betterment of the company.
What is IoT?
IoT is where the data comes from…that single version of the truth discussed above.
So, what is IoT (Internet of Things)? In it’s purest form IoT is:
Pulling data from sensors, pushing the data over a backhaul, transforming that data into valuable information, and using the information to enable powerful business outcomes.
To be clearly, IoT is the source of data, or better yet, information. That information becomes the basis on which decisions are made and valuable action is taken.
IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) is an idea that obviously originates from IoT. It is the application of IoT in manufacturing and heavy industry.
TWO USES FOR INDUSTRIAL IOT
There are two areas where Industrial IoT or Data Driven Manufacturing is typically used in manufacturing and heavy industry.
Smart Connected Operations
In manufacturing plants there are machines or equipment used to form raw materials into sellable products. Many of those machines are critical to that process, and are quite expensive to acquire, operate, and fix. Therefore, manufacturers want to keep the machines up and running as much as possible. The idea with Smart Connected Operations is to make these machines “smart” by connecting the machines using sensors, gateways, networks, software platforms, and other IT tools like servers, the cloud, etc. to implement an Industrial IoT solution.
The best solutions also pull contextual data from other sources like the operator, shift, the parts being run, the schedule, cycle times of the parts processed by the machine, and other characteristics. This data makes the machine data vastly more valuable because it now has “context”.
The combination of these two sets of data turn into a solution which provides the real value…real-time visibility into the operations on the plant floor.
Smart Connected Products
Now imagine those machines in the plant or used somewhere in heavy industry such as an oil or gas field. An OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) manufactured that piece of equipment.
Service: The OEM is likely responsible for a warranty and good operations of the machine for a period. Sending a technician to a distant oil field to simply see if it’s running well, let alone is it running at all is very expensive. Why not look at ways to reduce service and maintenance costs, prevent angry customer calls, and create a closer working relationship with the customer.
Innovation and Invention: The OEM likely wants to understand how those machines are used so they can sell more of them. They can do this by understanding how the machines are used in the field and then figure out how to improve the machines such as fix common issues, add new features, or come up with new inventive ideas based on those machines.
HELPING MANUFACTURERS DO MORE
There are inefficiencies in operations. Labor is more expensive and harder to find. You don’t have solid data to understand what’s going on at the plant floor.
We can help you get real-time visibility into the factory floor.
Mid-size OEM of compressors and welding/cutting equipment
Compressor OEM improved levels of service, equipment performance, and operational efficiencies.
UNIVERSAL ELECTRIC CORPORATION
Small Manufacturer, builds wire and cable solutions
Unplanned downtime has been reduced significantly, increasing asset utilization and revenue from that cell.
WHAT DATA-DRIVEN MANUFACTURING DOES FOR YOUR BUSINESS
REAL WORLD SOLUTIONS
Bayer Healthcare
The software developer doesn’t work here any more.
Estimated Life Remaining Calculation Reduces Expensive Downtime
Tier 1 Automotive Supplier
Down-time and OTD addressed with asset monitoring for Tier 1 Automotive Manufacturer
Compare Industrial IoT to Other Solutions
Solutions like Industrial IoT / Data-Driven Manufacturing have a unique place in companies and provide a lot of value. That value comes from our solutions’ unique ability to pull data from machines on the plant floor, innately understand that data, add other contextual data to it, and make the data understandable and valuable to all users. These tools are unique to and work with manufacturing processes and machines on the plant floor. We see some manufacturers trying to use other products and they end up missing a lot of the benefits otherwise available.
ERP
ERP systems are great for planning for the future by evaluating what happened in the past. ERP systems don’t provide real-time analytics on manufacturing processes and machines on which you can take immediate action. Using an ERP system for manufacturing analytics would be like driving by looking at your rearview mirror. Don’t get us wrong, ERP systems are valuable. Though, their place isn’t in providing that immediate, actionable data on what’s going on now on the factory floor.
Business Intelligence (BI)
Many BI systems provide insights into processes and are very general products used at the enterprise level. However, these products falter because they aren’t built to work with machine data and manufacturing processes. To adjust them to work in that way requires a very significant investment in additional time, people, and money to get the solutions to work optimally.
SCADA
SCADA systems primary focus is controlling the manufacturing process and what shouldn’t happen in that process. They aren’t able to provide explanations of what’s right and wrong. Additionally, many of the SCADA systems are built on older technology and struggle to make data available to the wide audience that requires the valuable manufacturing analytics data. Manufacturing analytics provides visibility.