The top strategic objectives in the manufacturing industry have remained consistent for years, primarily focused on serving customers. Industrial companies want to deliver
customers high-quality products, on time, at a globally competitive cost. They also want to be able to flex production capabilities up and down as needed to quickly introduce new products to the marketplace.
Pairing physical assets with intelligent gateways to gather, analyze and communicate data is driving enormous new efficiencies in manufacturing and business operations. You know this. Likewise, new operational efficiencies enabled by IoT are generating significant returns in manufacturing.
I see four pillars for IoT-enabled, smart factory optimization:
- Connectivity: With the ability to connect to everything, it is important to determine required data, along with the processes and operations needing improvement. You must then collect and curate relevant structured and unstructured data, across systems.
- Cloud: You must accelerate implementation and time-to-value via cloud data-centers to provide secure, scalable and flexible environments.
- Analytics: You must apply advanced analytics to gain new insights from manufacturing data. Dashboards visualize data patterns, enabling you to quickly assess equipment performance.
- Application Development: You must accelerate innovation and deliver high-quality products faster with agile-ready software-development solutions.
These four pillars are transforming manufacturing by providing greater intelligence, higher cognition, and smarter resources that enable organizations to thrive. In addition, this helps to drives cost savings and the ability to improve asset visibility/reliability, product quality/traceability, and resource efficiency/safety.