A connected factory, a robotic arm, and a power drill walk into a bar. The bartender asks them for data. All three start yelling at the same time. The bartender walks out. The next day, his body is found in a trough of disillusionment outside the old Gartner place. The data wars had begun…
Today, the rush to obtain IoT data creates both crisis and opportunity. Manufacturers crave data for optimizing operations. Equipment providers seek to elevate customer relationships and improve service offerings. Everyone is looking for ways to collect and transform data into business value. Whether or not data is indeed “the new oil,” a battle is brewing among those seeking to control and refine it for a competitive advantage.
Inside a manufacturing facility are multi-layered systems capable of producing and acting on industrial data. For example, the power drill provides temperature, torque, cycle times, and other operational data. Often, the drill is attached to a Robot, which produces additional information about jobs being done. In turn, both the drill and the Robot may be connected to an internal factory automation system. Data value comes from data analysis. Therefore, how data is collected, where it is stored, and who can access it are where battle lines are being drawn.
By now, most hardware manufacturers are delivering connected product systems. Many projects are spurred by the need to protect and improve service offerings and parts businesses. Increasingly, facility operators simply stop buying un-sensorized “dumb” machines, increasing pressure on OEMs to transform more quickly. Moreover, many industries are reaching the limits of efficiency achieved through analog mechanical improvements alone. The next leap forward will be digital, powered by data analysis and machine learning.
Each component, from lasers to split things and welders to put them together, is becoming its own, self-improving connected system. For simple manufacturing operations, this can be instantly transformative.
But what happens when multiple machines from several vendors are aggregated into more complex machinery, such as a robot with a drilling arm or a multi-phase packaging assembler? Furthermore, what happens when these systems are installed inside a complete manufacturing line?
Stakeholders at each layer may seek to control their data streams rather than allow them to flow freely into a central pool. A power drill providing data to the robot for analysis is at risk of becoming a replaceable commodity. Similarly, if the robot simply sends data from its own sensors along with drill data to a central automation system, it’s just a temporary aggregator with little value added. Each layer wants to be the provider of insights, not just information, to ensure its place in the value chain.
Sometimes, facility owners are successful in extracting data from each component on the manufacturing line. However, they are hard-pressed to transform this torrent of raw data into actionable information themselves before it seeps beneath the surface of an expanding data swamp. While many aren’t so ambitious in their data demands, no factory operator wants to log into separate monitoring applications for each equipment vendor on the floor. Therefore, in many facilities, only a fraction of potential value is being created from the data produced.
The tools of industrial IoT are being used against the optimized future they were designed to create. As we’ll see later, this same competitiveness may also be the key to a prosperous future peace.
