IoT is revolutionizing the ways that companies do business today, and they aren’t looking back. Across industries, cutting-edge technology such as AI, edge computing, and digital twins are going mainstream as companies build more agile factories, deliver innovation, and create more resilient supply chains. Indeed, in today’s complex and fast-paced marketplace, IoT adoption is becoming critical to maintaining a competitive edge, and—through a series of use cases and informative webinars—successful organizations are showing how it’s done.
Given the pandemic’s impact on supply chains, it’s no surprise that some of the most compelling steps toward digital transformation are taking place in the Manufacturing industry. According to the latest Microsoft IoT Signals report, 67 percent of those surveyed in Manufacturing industries stated they planned to accelerate use of IoT solutions over the next two years.
As the world’s industries accelerate their digital transformations, the existence of a rich and diverse partner ecosystem is becoming critical to provide the thousands of specialized solutions that use industrial IoT capabilities.
“Enterprises are being challenged by a plethora of technologies, applications, concepts and solutions,” says Shankar Gopalkrishnan, Senior Vice President, Manufacturing Vertical Business, HCL. Yet too often, these new technologies and applications “are siloed in nature,” Gopalkrishnan says. IoT aims to change that.
Among discrete manufacturers, production flow monitoring is the top reported application of IoT devices. And as recent studies are finding out, conventional machine vision systems used on assembly lines leave a lot to be desired. One study has shown that anywhere from 10 up to 40 percent of products can be defective. Unreliable tools can lower productivity further by identifying “false positives” that needlessly halt the production lines, thereby increasing costs, wasting time, and frustrating employees.
That’s why the latest IoT solutions use deep learning, IoT, and the cloud to detect defects and reduce their occurrence. Conventional tools are great at noticing mechanistic faults and deviations on production lines. “But how many of you work at sites”, asks Mariner’s David Dewhirst, Vice President of Marketing at Mariner, “where everything … is always clean, clear, and simple?” In response, many companies have developed visual inspection solutions designed to detect so-called “fuzzy” problems with a given product that a conventional machine vision system cannot, setting in motion a domino effect of advantages.
Just as IoT solutions are making manufacturing smarter, they’re also transforming the spaces around us, ranging from individual buildings to campuses to entire communities. The facility shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic put this issue top of mind. Studies showed that despite an occupancy drop of up to 50 percent in many buildings when the stay-at-home orders were enacted, energy consumption in those same spaces barely dropped at all.
