Building a responsive manufacturing plant with IIoT

According to estimates by IDC, expenditure on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in discrete manufacturing exceeded USD 150 billion in 2022, hinting at increasing understanding across industries of the value that deploying this technology can add to their respective businesses. In fact, enterprises, consumed with ramping up the capabilities of their digitization initiatives, have acknowledged IIoT as being a cornerstone of any endeavor undertaken in that direction. Managers are aware of the transformative potential of IIoT on not one or two spheres but across all functional domains in the manufacturing sector.

IIoT’s overarching functional umbrella

Given that disparate functional blocks ranging from in the ambit of the IIoT-powered system’s functionality include Information Technology (IT), Operational Technology (OT), and other core business functions, enterprises are eager to deploy this technology to transform end-to-end operations associated with production. Consequently, an IIoT-enabled system’s wide ambit makes the convergence of two previously isolated functional spheres – IT and OT – a feasible proposition, putting companies in a position to align their operations such that they complementary.

Deployment of IIoT systems can, besides enhancing the efficiency of asset management systems, streamline data flow, and enable adoption of efficient supply chain management practices, thereby opening up new hitherto unexplored revenue opportunities.

Gaining ‘actionable’ insights

The sophistication and the obviously impressive scale of its operations notwithstanding, the true value of an IIoT system deployed in a manufacturing plant is to be assessed by the ease and application of the ‘actionable’ insights derived from this set-up. Several manufacturing companies, ranging from those making precision instruments to those engaged in the development of heavy machinery, have deployed IIoT systems to co-ordinate key operations on a large scale. These include ensuring co-ordination in the operations of remote plants, accumulation and collation of data from sensors running into tens of thousands, among other complex processes. Ensuring that all the various functional arms of the production system are working in concert with each other is vital to streamlining flow of operative data, besides regulating operational flow.

The ability of an enterprise, even with the most advanced IIoT hardware can be hamstrung if it is not complemented by its digital capabilities. A company’s failure to digitize end-to-end data management processes, starting from collection to storage, can cost them dear in a marketplace that is transitioning towards digitization at a furious pace.

Data-driven operations

The efficiency and capabilities of an IIoT-powered set-up is directly proportional to the abilities of its data-driven operations. These include data collection, management, contextualization, and dissemination. It is vital that these various processes, all part of an integrated system, need to be performed such that they enable the larger system to be more flexible and responsive. To that end, contextualizing the data, be it collected either from the design department or the marketing wing, becomes crucial. Ensuring that the data is read, and subsequently transmitted with its attendant context, ensures that it is readily consumed by the stakeholder concerned.

Agile operations

For enterprises to optimize the benefits they can accrue from the adoption of IIoT systems, it is imperative that they employ a holistic approach to production, and all the auxiliary processes. Such a holistic vision for any production development cycle will lend capabilities to the IIoT system, enabling managers to streamline work flow, align business practices with key functional modules, and drive the efficiency of data management processes.

A unified IIoT solution can help enterprises register an uptick in performance indicators across the board. More often than not, companies are awakened to the necessity of a unified platform after deploying IIoT systems, and integration of such a platform can then become a cumbersome exercise. Therefore, the need for an integrated platform that allows for information gathered from all technologies – virtual and augmented reality, digital twins, et al – can be efficiently used to boost overall productivity. In fact, it is the lack of such an integrated or unified platform that is throttling efforts to derive maximum value from IIoT-powered systems.

A platform that integrates all the disparate technologies thereby enabling collection of transmission of functional data in real-time can allow for an agile system that can be re-configured from, say, a product-centric position to a customer-oriented function. Such a set-up would allow managers to analyze data collected from a multitude of sensors using Big Data tools, enabling them to identify, and subsequently, prioritize, services offered to customers.

Simulation and design assistance

The vastly superior simulation tools that are part of an IIoT system’s make-up – the digital twin comes to mind, immediately – allow for enterprises to assemble a shop floor geared towards optimizing production, while reducing incidence of technical failure, which can greatly impact a company’s ability to meet its deadlines. IIoT’s improved simulation models also allow for the adoption of ‘Predictive Maintenance’ models that can improve the efficiency of quality checks, besides allowing managers to accurately evaluate the throughput potential of the assembly line. This simulation model is one of the most illustrative examples of the utility value of an IIoT-powered set-up, which can as effectively and elegantly bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual world. However, for enterprises to be in a position to accrue all these benefits, they need to adopt a flexible and scalable unifying platform that offers end-to-end visibility across all operations of the production development cycle.

From the design stage, where engineers can lean on digital modelling systems to better align their vision to meet requirements while ensuring that requirement of resources remains within permissible limits, to marketing and distribution, an IIoT-powered system, if allied to an integrated operational platform, can ensure that the entire manufacturing cycle is not merely aligned with, but can actually respond to, the changing requirements of the market.