Manufacturers face a range of challenges, from increasing customer expectations to the complexity of the global Supply Chain. As a result, businesses are looking for new, innovative ways to stay competitive. Digital transformation is one such approach. Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) is a powerful tool that can help businesses optimize their production processes and supply chain operations. IoT uses sensors to gather critical production data and cloud software to convert it into valuable insights about manufacturing efficiency.

Adopting IoT in Manufacturing

Several drivers are behind the adoption of IoT solutions in manufacturing:

• Cost reduction: By optimizing asset and inventory management, reducing machine downtime, and using energy more efficiently, companies can lower operational costs and create new sources of revenue. Smart, connected products can even help shift from selling products to selling experiences, including product usage and post-sale services.
• Shorter time-to-market: Faster and more efficient manufacturing and supply chain operations allow manufacturers to reduce product cycle time. For example, Harley-Davidson used IoT to reconfigure its York, PA manufacturing facility and reduce the time to produce a motorbike from 21 days to 6 hours.
• Mass customization: The mass customization process requires a significant increase in the variety of produced SKUs, causing inventory to become more diverse. IoT simplifies mass customization by providing real-time data that enables thoughtful forecasting, shop floor scheduling, and routing.
• Improved safety: IoT promotes a safer workplace by monitoring workers’ health state and risky activities, particularly in hazardous environments like oil and gas facilities where IoT is used to monitor gas leakages as they travel through the pipe network.

IoT’s Impact Across Three Dimensions

The advent of IoT technologies is revolutionizing production systems, bringing about improvements in three critical areas of digital transformation. These dimensions include:

• Dimension 1: Visibility into shop floor and field operations
• Dimension 2: Visibility into the manufacturing supply chain
• Dimension 3: Visibility into remote and outsourced operations

In this article, we will delve deeper into each of these digital transformation dimensions and explore them from the perspective of IoT applications.

Dimension 1: Visibility into Shop Floor and Field Operations from the Top Floor

The Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) provides a revolutionary level of visibility into shop floor and field operations and offers the possibility of easy control over enterprise resources. IoT technologies address the limitations of systems like ERP and MES, such as reliance on manual data input and inability to work with detailed information like real-time equipment status records and inventory item locations. By providing manufacturers with second-by-second shop floor data, IoT allows businesses to significantly increase manufacturing process productivity. According to IBM, using IoT insights for manufacturing process optimization can increase the product count from the same production line by up to 20%.

Manufacturers can gain a higher level of vertical visibility through IoT applications, which fall into two groups:

• Applications supporting manufacturing operations
• Applications facilitating industrial asset management

IoT-Driven Manufacturing Operations

McKinsey research estimates that by 2025, improvements in operations driven by IoT applications could be worth more than $470 billion per year. IoT applications for manufacturing deal with operations such as monitoring and optimizing equipment performance, production quality control, and human-to-machine interaction.

Monitoring Equipment Utilization

ITIF research indicates that IoT applications for monitoring machine utilization can increase manufacturing productivity by 10% to 25%, producing up to $1.8 trillion in global economic value by 2025. IoT solutions for monitoring machine utilization provide real-time equipment utilization metrics, giving businesses a detailed view of every point in the production process. Monitoring machine utilization involves collecting relevant data about machine operating parameters, like run time, actual operating speed, and product output, from sensors, SCADA or DCS systems. The data is gathered in real time and transmitted to the cloud for processing. After analysis, the results are displayed to factory workers via a user app (either web or mobile) in the form of informative insights about equipment utilization KPIs (TEEP, OEE, setup and adjustment time, idling and minor stops, etc.).

Condition Monitoring for Product Quality Control

Quality control for manufactured goods can be done in two ways: inspecting work in progress (WIP) as it goes through production or monitoring the condition and calibration of the machines used to make the products. While inspecting WIPs provides accurate results, it has limitations such as being applicable only for discrete manufacturing, being costly and time-intensive, and providing only a fractional view. On the other hand, monitoring machine conditions can detect bottlenecks, identify underperforming machines, prevent damages, and more, even if it only provides a binary classification of “good” or “not good.” Parameters such as equipment calibration, machine conditions, and environmental conditions are monitored, and a quality monitoring solution identifies issues and recommends actions to minimize the production of low-quality products.

Safety Monitoring

In industries like mining, oil & gas, and transport, workers are given RFID tags and wearable sensors to monitor their location, heart rate, skin temperature, and other data. This sensor data is analyzed with contextual data from environmental sensors, work planning systems, weather feeds, and more to detect unusual behavior patterns and prevent injuries. For example, if a worker’s skin temperature and heart rate are high with no movement for about a minute, it could indicate overheating. An IoT solution can notify a worker’s manager or doctor via a mobile app in such a situation.

IoT Applications in Industrial Asset Management

The Internet of Things (IoT) is being used to improve the effectiveness of manufacturing operations and to ensure proper asset usage, extend equipment service life, improve reliability, and provide the best return on assets. There are several IoT applications that facilitate industrial asset management, including industrial asset tracking, inventory management, and predictive maintenance based on condition monitoring.

Industrial Asset Tracking:

Zebra’s 2017 Manufacturing Vision Study predicts that smart asset tracking solutions based on RFID and IoT will overtake traditional, spreadsheet-based methods by 2022. IoT-based asset management solutions provide accurate real-time data about an enterprise’s assets, their statuses, locations, and movements, freeing up to 18 hours of monthly working time for employees and eliminating errors bound to manual data input methods.

RFID tags, which serve as asset identifiers, are used together with IoT to enable asset tracking for manufacturing. Each tag has a unique ID that is linked to the data about a particular asset, including physical parameters, cost, serial number, model, assigned employee, area of use, etc. RFID readers installed at the entrance of storage yards and construction sites scan the tags, updating the data in the cloud. By logging this data, technicians can see the movements of the assets and calculate utilization, pinpointing idling or underused machines and scheduling preventive maintenance.

Enterprise Inventory Management:

IoT-driven inventory management solutions help manufacturers automate inventory tracking and reporting, ensure constant visibility into the statuses and locations of individual inventory items, and optimize lead time. Smart inventory management solutions are reported to save 20% to 50% of an enterprise’s inventory carrying costs. Each inventory item gets labelled with a passive RFID tag, which carries the data about the item the tag is attached to. RFID readers are used to fetch data from the tags, and the data about the location of the RFID reader and the time of the reading are relayed to the cloud. The cloud pinpoints the location and the status of each item and displays the findings to the users.

Predictive Maintenance, Condition Monitoring:

Predictive maintenance solutions based on the Industrial IoT are expected to reduce factory equipment maintenance costs by 40% and generate the economic value of $630 billion annually by 2025. Predictive maintenance relies on the insights gained with continuous equipment condition monitoring, which involves sensors collecting data on a wide range of parameters determining equipment health and performance. Real-time data from multiple sensors is transmitted to the cloud, where sensor readings are combined with metadata, equipment usage history, and maintenance data. The combined data set is analyzed, visualized, and presented to shop floor workers on a dashboard or in a mobile app. Machine learning algorithms pinpoint abnormal patterns that may lead to equipment failures, creating predictive models that identify potential failures and recommend mitigating actions.

In conclusion, the IoT is transforming the manufacturing industry by improving industrial asset management. By enabling industrial asset tracking, enterprise inventory management, and predictive maintenance based on condition monitoring, the IoT is reducing costs, improving equipment performance and reliability, and increasing the return on assets.

Dimension 2: Enhancing Visibility in the Manufacturing Supply Chain

At present, more than half of supply chain managers find end-to-end supply chain visibility to be a distant goal. However, the adoption of IoT-driven Manufacturing Supply Chain management solutions is projected to be optimistic. By 2020, IDC estimates that 80% of supply chain interactions will occur across cloud-based networks, with a predicted 15% increase in supply chain productivity and 10% increase in cost efficiency through the transition to smart, IoT-enabled supply chain management solutions.

Smart supply chain management solutions provide manufacturers with real-time insights into the location, status, and condition of every object throughout the manufacturing supply chain. One significant benefit of IoT in manufacturing supply chain optimization is that it allows for a shift from knowing the availability of a particular SKU to knowing the status of each item within that SKU. Traditional supply chain management methods only provide general data on the availability of an SKU, whereas with IoT, enterprises can obtain data on the location, production date, shelf life, and other properties of each individual item within an SKU.

In addition to monitoring the location and properties of objects, IoT is applied to monitor the conditions under which objects are stored and delivered. Previously, the condition of goods could only be monitored upon arrival at the delivery point. Now, IoT enables the monitoring of materials, components, and goods en route, which is especially relevant for manufacturers of breakable and perishable items such as pharmaceuticals, food, glassware, and modern nanomaterials.

Consider a pharmaceutical company shipping an order to a distribution center through a third-party logistics service provider. Sensors attached to the containers monitor the temperature inside the containers. Suppose a cooling system failure causes the temperature inside the containers to rise. A temperature sensor attached to the inner side of the container detects the deviation from the recommended threshold. The IoT solution notifies the manufacturer that the delivery conditions have been violated and alerts the driver, who resets the cooling system, thus preventing spoilage of the transported medicines.

Dimension 3: Visibility into Remote and Outsourced Operations

 In today’s global economy, logistics costs, demand for customization, and the complexity of the supply chain have led many manufacturing enterprises to outsource their operations to different cities, states, and even countries. However, ensuring that these remote and outsourced operations maintain production standards can be challenging. Fortunately, IoT solutions can provide visibility into these operations by enabling predictive maintenance, real-time monitoring, and access to critical data.

Equal Opportunities for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

IoT solutions not only benefit large enterprises but also provide equal transformational opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises. By relying on cloud computing and universal software, IoT makes digital transformation possible for SMEs.

The Challenges of IoT Adoption

The adoption of Industrial IoT presents several challenges for US enterprises, including concerns about ROI, data security and privacy issues, a lack of qualified employees, and integration with legacy systems. These challenges need to be addressed to ensure successful IoT adoption.

To Wrap It Up

The Industrial IoT offers significant benefits to manufacturing enterprises by improving productivity, reducing costs, and enhancing the customer experience. However, successful IoT adoption requires careful planning and execution to overcome the challenges associated with IoT adoption.

The post The Complete Guide to IoT Implementation in Manufacturing appeared first on Etelligens.