Manufacturers are confronted with a spectrum of difficulties, ranging from escalating customer expectations to the intricate nature of the worldwide supply chain. Consequently, businesses are seeking fresh and inventive strategies to maintain competitiveness. Digital transformation emerges as one such strategy. The Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) emerges as a potent instrument that can aid businesses in refining their production procedures and supply chain activities. IoT utilizes sensors to amass vital production data, and cloud software converts this data into valuable insights about manufacturing efficiency.
Embracing IoT in Manufacturing
Numerous catalysts underpin the assimilation of IoT solutions in the manufacturing realm:
1. Cost Reduction: By optimizing asset and inventory management, diminishing machine downtime, and enhancing energy utilization, enterprises can curtail operational expenses and engender new revenue streams. Smart, interconnected products can even facilitate a shift from selling goods to marketing experiences, encompassing product usage and post-sale services.
2. Accelerated Time-to-Market: More rapid and efficient manufacturing and supply chain operations empower manufacturers to truncate product cycle durations. For instance, Harley-Davidson harnessed IoT to revamp its York, PA manufacturing facility and shrink the motorbike production duration from 21 days to a mere 6 hours.
3. Mass Customization: The mass customization process necessitates a significant augmentation in the assortment of generated SKUs, rendering inventory more varied. IoT simplifies mass customization by supplying real-time data, facilitating astute forecasting, shop floor scheduling, and routing.
4. Enhanced Safety: IoT fosters a safer working environment by supervising workers’ health status and precarious activities, particularly in hazardous settings like oil and gas installations, where IoT is utilized to oversee gas leaks within pipe networks.
The Influence of IoT Across Three Dimensions
The advent of IoT technologies is instigating a transformation in production systems, yielding enhancements across three pivotal facets of digital transformation. These dimensions encompass:
Dimension 1: Insight into Shop Floor and Field Operations
Dimension 2: Visibility into the Manufacturing Supply Chain
Dimension 3: Visibility into Remote and Outsourced Operations
This article undertakes a comprehensive exploration of each of these dimensions, examining them through the prism of IoT applications.
Dimension 1: Illuminating Shop Floor and Field Operations from the Apex
The Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) imparts an unprecedented level of clarity into shop floor and field operations, offering the prospect of seamless oversight over enterprise resources. IoT technologies surmount the constraints of systems such as ERP and MES, surmounting issues like manual data entry reliance and the incapacity to engage with intricate information, like real-time equipment status records and inventory item whereabouts. By furnishing manufacturers with real-time shop floor data, IoT enables substantial augmentation of manufacturing process efficacy. According to IBM, leveraging IoT insights for process optimization can amplify product output from the same production line by up to 20%.
Manufacturers can attain a higher echelon of vertical visibility through IoT applications, which can be classified into two categories:
1. Applications supporting manufacturing operations.
2. Applications facilitating industrial asset management.
IoT-Enabled Manufacturing Operations
McKinsey research approximates that by 2025, enhancements in operations steered by IoT applications could yield a value exceeding $470 billion annually. IoT applications for manufacturing encompass functions like equipment performance monitoring and optimization, production quality control, and human-machine interaction.
Monitoring Equipment Utilization
Research from ITIF suggests that IoT applications for monitoring machine utilization can amplify manufacturing productivity by 10% to 25%, generating up to $1.8 trillion in global economic value by 2025. IoT solutions for monitoring machine utilization offer real-time metrics on equipment utilization, providing enterprises with a comprehensive overview of each phase within the production process. This entails the collection of pertinent data about machine operation parameters, such as runtime, actual operating speed, and product output, derived from sensors, SCADA, or DCS systems. The data is amassed in real-time and transmitted to the cloud for analysis. After evaluation, outcomes are presented to factory personnel via a user application (either web-based or mobile), conveying informative insights concerning equipment utilization KPIs (Total Effective Equipment Performance, Overall Equipment Efficiency, setup and adjustment time, idling and minor halts, etc.).
Condition Monitoring for Quality Control
Quality assurance for manufactured goods can be accomplished via two methodologies: inspecting work in progress (WIP) as it advances through production or monitoring the condition and calibration of the machinery employed in production. Although inspecting WIPs yields precise results, it comes with limitations such as applicability solely to discrete manufacturing, high costs, time-intensity, and a partial perspective. Conversely, monitoring machine conditions can pinpoint bottlenecks, detect underperforming machinery, prevent damage, and more, even if it solely provides a binary classification of “acceptable” or “unacceptable.” Parameters such as equipment calibration, machinery conditions, and environmental conditions are monitored, with a quality monitoring solution detecting issues and proposing measures to curtail the production of subpar items.
Safety Monitoring
In sectors like mining, oil & gas, and transportation, workers are equipped with RFID tags and wearable sensors to oversee their location, heart rate, skin temperature, and additional data. This sensor data is scrutinized in conjunction with contextual data sourced from environmental sensors, task planning systems, weather updates, and more, aiming to discern anomalous behavioral patterns and avert accidents. For instance, if a worker’s skin temperature and heart rate escalate without movement for approximately a minute, it might signal overheating. An IoT solution can alert the worker’s supervisor or physician via a mobile application in such instances.
IoT Applications in Industrial Asset Management
The Internet of Things (IoT) is harnessed to heighten the efficacy of manufacturing operations, guarantee appropriate asset utilization, elongate equipment service life, augment reliability, and deliver optimal asset returns. Several IoT applications facilitate industrial asset management, encompassing industrial asset tracking, inventory management, and predictive maintenance grounded in condition monitoring.
Industrial Asset Tracking
Zebra’s 2017 Manufacturing Vision Study prophesies that smart asset tracking solutions grounded in RFID and IoT will eclipse conventional spreadsheet-based methodologies by 2022. IoT-driven asset management solutions furnish accurate, real-time data about an enterprise’s assets, encompassing their statuses, locations, and movements. This obviates up to 18 hours of monthly labor for employees and eliminates errors inherent in manual data entry procedures.
RFID tags, serving as asset identifiers, collaborate with IoT to enable asset tracking in manufacturing. Each tag features a unique ID linked to specific asset data, encompassing physical attributes, cost, serial number, model, assigned personnel, operational area, etc. RFID readers positioned at storage yard and construction site entrances scan the tags, updating cloud-stored data. Through this log, technicians can trace asset movements, compute utilization, and identify idle or underutilized machinery, thus scheduling preventive maintenance.
Enterprise Inventory Management
IoT-driven inventory management solutions aid manufacturers in automating inventory tracking and reporting, guaranteeing perpetual insights into individual inventory item statuses and locations, and optimizing lead times. These intelligent inventory management solutions purportedly save 20% to 50% of enterprise inventory carrying costs. Each inventory item is affixed with a passive RFID tag, bearing data pertinent to the item it’s attached to. RFID readers extract data from these tags, relaying data about RFID reader location and reading time to the cloud. The cloud deciphers item statuses and locations, furnishing this information to users.
Predictive Maintenance and Condition Monitoring
Predictive maintenance solutions anchored in Industrial IoT are anticipated to pare factory equipment maintenance expenses by 40%, generating annual economic value worth $630 billion by 2025. Predictive maintenance hinges on insights derived from continuous equipment condition monitoring, with sensors collecting data concerning a spectrum of parameters dictating equipment health and performance. Real-time data from numerous sensors is routed to the cloud, where sensor readings harmonize with metadata, equipment usage history, and maintenance data. The amalgamated dataset is scrutinized, visualized, and rendered to shop floor personnel through a dashboard or mobile app. Machine learning algorithms detect atypical patterns that could precipitate equipment failures, forging predictive models that flag potential malfunctions and propose corrective measures.
To conclude, IoT is revolutionizing the manufacturing sector by enhancing industrial asset management. Through enabling industrial asset tracking, enterprise inventory management, and condition-monitored predictive maintenance, IoT engenders cost savings, amplifies equipment performance and reliability, and elevates asset returns.
Dimension 2: Augmenting Visibility in the Manufacturing Supply Chain
At present, more than half of supply chain managers consider end-to-end supply chain visibility an elusive goal. Nonetheless, the embrace of IoT-driven manufacturing supply chain management solutions is sanguine. By 2020, IDC prognosticates that 80% of supply chain interactions will transpire across cloud-based networks, with an envisaged 15% surge in supply chain productivity and a 10% uptick in cost efficiency, courtesy of the transition to smart, IoT-infused supply chain management solutions.
These ingenious supply chain management solutions endow manufacturers with real-time insights into the whereabouts, statuses, and conditions of each object across the manufacturing supply chain. A notable advantage of IoT in manufacturing supply chain optimization is the shift from merely knowing SKU availability to comprehending the status of every individual item within that SKU. Traditional supply chain management methods merely furnish general data about SKU availability, while IoT empowers enterprises with information regarding the location, production date, shelf life, and other attributes of each item within an SKU.
In tandem with object location and attributes, IoT extends its purview to monitor the conditions under which objects are warehoused and transported. Previously, goods’ conditions were ascertained solely upon their arrival at the delivery site. However, IoT bestows the capability to monitor materials, components, and goods en route, a particularly pertinent facet for manufacturers of fragile and perishable items like pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs, glassware, and contemporary nanomaterials.
Imagine a pharmaceutical company dispatching an order to a distribution center via a third-party logistics service provider. Containers are affixed with sensors that monitor container interior temperatures. In the event of a cooling system malfunction causing temperatures to spike, an internal temperature sensor detects the deviation from the recommended threshold. The IoT solution promptly notifies the manufacturer of the breach in delivery conditions, alerting the driver, who rectifies the cooling system glitch, thereby circumventing spoilage of transported medications.
Dimension 3: Transparency into Remote and Outsourced Operations
In today’s global economic landscape, logistics expenses, customization demands, and supply chain intricacies have impelled numerous manufacturing entities to outsource operations to disparate locations, be they cities, states, or even nations. However, upholding production standards in these remote and outsourced operations poses a challenge. Fortunately, IoT solutions can furnish visibility into these operations by facilitating predictive maintenance, real-time monitoring, and access to vital data.
Equitable Opportunities for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises
IoT solutions confer not only advantages to large corporations but also extend equitable opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises. By relying on cloud computing and universal software, IoT democratizes digital transformation for SMEs.
The Hurdles of IoT Adoption
The adoption of Industrial IoT introduces several challenges for US enterprises, encompassing concerns about return on investment, data security and privacy quandaries, a paucity of proficient personnel, and integration with legacy systems. Conquering these challenges is imperative to ensure successful IoT implementation.
In a Nutshell
The Industrial IoT presents substantial advantages to manufacturing enterprises, enhancing efficiency, curtailing expenses, and elevating the customer experience. Nevertheless, realizing the potential of IoT necessitates meticulous planning and execution to surmount the obstacles tied to its adoption.
