Why Manufacturing Plants should invest in Industry 4.0?

80 of every 100 companies are overcharged on utility expenses through discrepancies and wrongly calculated bills by the utility providers. And the most affected once are the large industrial facilities which consume a huge amount of energy, such as automotive manufacturing plants. It has been measured that the utility providers can easily overcharge such manufacturing plants more than hundred thousand USD in a single billing mistake.

With nearly 80 million vehicles are anticipated to be sold by the end of 2019, the $1 trillion automotive industry is on pirouette. Vehicle customization is on its all-time peak where customers’ demands ranging from interior gadgets to emerging technologies like AR heads-up displays, and 3D laminated windshield. The huge demand increased the pressure on product delivery as well as profit margins for manufacturing units. Thus, car manufacturers need to improve operational efficiency to reduce manufacturing costs.

The industry 4.0 or Industrial Internet of Things the significant response to these challenges. As part of its 2019 Worldwide Semiannual IoT Spending Guide, IDC states that total hardware spending is $250 billion and spending on IoT software will count to $150 billion in 2019.

Amid the hype of IoT solutions for manufacturers, two questions pop up about IIoT implementation.

"What production faults can IoT solve?"

"Can it be implemented at a justifiable investment?"

The real value of IoT can be realized when the data is associated with various Key Performing Indicators (KPIs) i.e. quality, traceability, maintenance, and productivity. With a variety of IoT implementation is at PoC stage, companies are peeping in the untapped opportunities of operational efficiencies.

Following are the aid to the key pain areas of manufacturing units:

Tracking overall equipment effectiveness

Manufacturers want to transform the raw material using least resources. Improving OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) enhances the production quantity as well as quality. To do so, it is crucial to recognize bottlenecks in a plant. Depending on the size of the production plant, manual monitoring slows down the production process and requires additional man-hours which could have been used for other important tasks.

IoT helps facilities in monitoring the status of production equipment remotely by providing real-time insights into the machine uptime and potential breakdowns. By utilizing the CT sensors, IoT vendors are coming up with power monitoring solutions which provide the manufacturing facilities with the machine uptime data in real-time.

Predictive Quality & Maintenance

The facilities regularly perform periodic maintenance every month or two, requiring shutting down of the plant. IoT enables predictive maintenance which eliminates the unnecessary maintenance check, which saves the lost production time. Once a plant upgrades from periodic to CBM (Condition Based Maintenance), managers want to know when their equipment is due for maintenance. The maintenance predictions are made based on the historical data of equipment health.

Same goes for quality control, the facilities want to upgrade from sample-based control to predictive quality check of every part of the products and raise alarms to management if the produce quality deviates from the pre-specified roles.

Energy Monitoring & Conservation

Manufacturing units usually focus on one-point energy consumption monitoring, which only provides overall energy use by the entire facility. But to know where energy is being wasted and where the gaps exist, it is necessary to monitor energy consumption at every stage. Sensors, coupled with software, can monitor which equipment are running and where are unnecessary energy losses. Monitoring at every level of the facility means insights into losses and the capability to take appropriate action.

Product Trace-ability

There is a need to establish a descent of the complete chain of the production facility supply. Suppose that the part the owner received from the dealer had faults. For example, if a car had defective brake assembly, then the manufacturer would require to call every car back which is a very expensive and disruptive action.

IIoT enables the manufacturers to trace back every particular part to where it was produced and determine if it is a part-level problem, machine-level problem, or a component-level problem, limiting the scope of the recall.

The best way to implement IoT for any manufacturer who is just getting started with Industry 4.0 is to identify the greatest pain point from those above and go with an IIoT solution to address one problem at a time. Some of the IoT vendors provide customizable IoT solution which can be upgraded as per needs. This approach will generate the best ROI and pave the way ahead for a successful transition and implementation.

Sanjeev is the founder of Biz4Intellia, one of the leading IoT development companies in Usa. He is extremely passionate about the Internet of Things and keeps on exploring the possibilities unleashed by IoT on a constant note.