The Industrial IoT is Bringing Smart Manufacturing to Life

Information and analytics: Used in conjunction with scalable computing, a scalable analytics approach will convert raw data into actionable information at different levels of the enterprise to help make better and timely decisions. Plant-floor workers can use local real-time analytics to take immediate actions for improving the uptime of devices and machines. At the same time, management can use plant-performance analytics to compare site-to-site performance and track compliance.

Visualization and mobility: Operators and maintenance technicians must be able to quickly access and act on the information anytime and anywhere, without being overwhelmed by it. Manufacturers need visualization software that can deliver critical information to mobile and desktop devices in an intuitive, easy-to-understand manner, such as with graphics-based displays. They also increasingly need emerging visualization technologies such as augmented reality to deliver and quickly act on information. Today, mobility is a must-have to make sure workers can access information regardless of where they are.

Secure networking: Defense-in-depth security is considered a security best practice. It assumes that any one point of protection can and likely will be defeated, and uses layers of security through a combination of physical, electronic and procedural security measures.

Manufacturers and industrial operators needing help with security can use industry reference architectures and frameworks. These documents are freely available, such as through the Cisco and Rockwell Automation Converged Plantwide Ethernet (CPwE) program, and provide helpful guidance for managing network-access security and addressing unknown risks.

Smart Manufacturing in Action

The power of smart manufacturing comes to life when industrial IoT technologies work in concert toward specific business goals.

Imagine a hypothetical plant where a controller uses real-time analytics to detect that a pump is nearing failure. As soon as it discovers those leading indicators, the controller can take immediate action to change the speed of the pump to help prevent failure. It also can share the data to the cloud to compensate or optimize production as needed elsewhere in the plant. These actions, occurring in the blink of an eye, can help improve asset utilization, help prevent downtime and optimize energy usage.

Chinese pharmaceutical maker Zhejiang Medicine Co. (ZMC) provides a real-world example of industrial IoT benefits. To help its new facility go paperless, the company implemented a manufacturing execution system (MES) with electronic-batch-recording capabilities. The fully integrated MES pulls orders from ERP business systems, identifies the materials that need to be retrieved, and guides workers through the production process. It also captures key information during production and uses real-time alarming and exception handling to alert workers of issues.

The MES software helped ZMC achieve its goal of a 100 percent paperless facility. That, in turn, helped the company reduce its labor costs by 5 to 10 percent by eliminating manual data recording. The company also estimates the MES will help reduce batch-record review times by 46 to 75 percent, and management-review cycle times by 50 percent.

A New Era Underway

As ZMC and many other companies prove, the smart manufacturing era has not only arrived, it’s well underway. Manufacturers and industrial operators that hesitate to embrace this new era risk putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage against those that do.