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A competitive market has complex challenges.

If you’re not gathering, processing, and analyzing industrial data in the way your competition does, you may face even more challenges. Data creates an opportunity to innovate. To use it correctly, you need software.

Benefits of Industrial IoT

According to Accenture, by 2020. 60 per cent of global manufacturers will use data-tracked analytics from connected devices to analyze and optimize processes, and manufacturers will invest more than US$70 billion in industrial internet of things (IIoT) by 2020. At the same time, only 36 per cent of all leaders truly understand IoT, and only 7 per cent of them are able to implement it.

The same report shows that being unable to implement IoT in factories creates a 50 per cent decrease in product development and about the same amount of spike in assembly costs. Sure, systems dedicated to tracking production progress in factories are nothing new, but IIoT provides far more intricate technology.

A digital factory allows machines to transmit information to a manufacturer’s partners. Operation managers can gather data and manage processes off-site. Leveraging automation will lead to optimization and identification of key result areas (KRAs).

Monitoring of production flow enables the monitoring of production lines, from the refining process to final packaging to make the factory run smoother. It provides managers with justification for discussion about adjustments and operational costs. It may also reduce or even eliminate waste.

The benefits of IIoT reach far beyond simple monitoring. The use of sensors spawns condition-based management alarms. Imagine a situation in which a machine’s temperature rising beyond its limit. Alarms sent to a mobile app can save costly equipment repairs and lost working hours.

IIoT is helpful when it comes to area access monitoring. A worker who is not permitted to access certain areas in a factory will not get in.

Quality control is also easier to achieve. Every stage of the production cycle can be monitored and checked. All these factors play a huge role in investment, marketing, and strategic planning decisions. All can be aided by IIoT.

Collecting information from ERP and PLM systems will help managers as well. Being able to track materials, equipment, and products will help them to predict issues like shortages and misplaced parts. In a nutshell, it will smoothen co-operation among the factory, its suppliers, and delivery companies.

Predictive maintenance is also a key area. According to Deloitte, IIoT technology dedicated to predictive maintenance will significantly cut maintenance costs.

A business necessity

The amount of data in manufacturing is growing exponentially. But can we capture this data and turn it into knowledge? That’s where modern IT comes into play.

Thanks to the cloud, everyone can have big data storage and processing power without a huge, upfront investment in their own infrastructure. Broadband internet transfers massive amounts of data from your factory to the cloud. There you can employ artificial intelligence to generate knowledge from it automatically. That knowledge can help you improve your day-to-day operations and achieve your long-term strategic goals.

Digital transformation is a must. There’s no going around it, there’s no going back.

With the rise of 5G technology, the pool of data to process and analyze will only get bigger. One of the key benefits of 5G is network slicing, which generally means using different levels of connectivity for different cases.

It provides reliable, low-latency communication. Along with the massive opportunities for adoption of IIoT, emerging 5G technology is another must-have. To expand network capabilities, companies must understand three uses of 5G slicing:

1. Enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB): eMBB provides higher bandwidth and higher speed. It’s important in the context of cloud services, fleet management telematics, diagnostics, and safety.

2. Ultra-reliable low-latency communication (uRLLC): uRLLC supports real-time communications for industrial automation.

3. Massive internet of things (mIoT): MIoT serves billions of low-cost, long-range, energy-efficient connected devices across remote locations, as well as cloud applications, with periodic, infrequent communication.

Entering the cloud

All of this digital transformation can be done thanks to the cloud. However, getting it all right is not straightforward. To benefit from the cloud, a software system needs to shift the paradigm from an all-in-one, monolith structure to multiple, lightweight, independent services that work together to deliver business functionality. That’s where microservices architecture comes into play. The main features of microservices are:

• Scalability. Software written in a way that supports scalability of cloud resources is best. During increased load, more hardware resources are allocated to match the system’s demand, and individual components can be scaled as needed.
• Resilience. Even if some part of the microservice system fails, the whole system will continue to work with some degraded functionality. It is possible to plan redundancy for the critical parts of the system to minimize the impact of a failure. Every microservice in the system also is constantly monitored. In the event of health-check failure, the system recovers the failing part without manual intervention.
• Technology heterogeneity. It is possible to mix various software technologies and frameworks in a single system. This allows choosing the best tool for the job without compromising usability or performance.
• Organizational alignment. Organizing autonomous, multi-skilled development teams around business domain-oriented microservices makes the teams become experts in their domain. People grasp business problems faster and more accurately, which reduces implementation time and the number of defects.

Industrial manufacturing is changing. To keep up with market demands and more customization of products, companies must consider turning to the capabilities IIoT offers.

Bartłomiej Undak is co-founder and a board member of CSHARK, Rynek 36/37, 50-102 Wrocław, Poland, www.cshark.com, 48-887-722-166.