To say that the media hype surrounding the Fourth Industrial Revolution is overwhelming would be an understatement, at least. This is understandable given that the IIoT/Industrie 4.0 era is all about the benefits of actionable information, and there would be no grounds for it to even exist if we were not currently living in an information age. One of the problems is that the amount of Internet-based content, on any subject imaginable, is increasing exponentially, but how much of it is actually credible?
What we have strived for in this handbook is to scoop away the frothy hysteria of trillion dollar revenues and 50 billion connected ‘fridges’ to try and reveal what the IIoT is really all about, and how easy it is for companies to get started with data they may already have,
but often don’t even realise it. (As an aside, a flood of useful data could be generated virtually overnight, and with very little capital outlay, simply by enabling the myriad of unconnected HART devices that already exist in the field.)
Be that as it may, the industrial Internet is nothing more than a platform for exposing device related data in real time – it just happens to be the biggest platform of its type that has ever existed. The value however is only realised if the right data is collected to begin with, and, the business is then committed to doing exactly what it needs to with the resulting ‘actionable’ information. In other words, no company is ever going to show return on an IIoT project unless it was first rigorously analysed in the context of that particular organisation’s operating procedures and its business culture. Business culture is perhaps the thornier of the two issues here because senior management, very often quite rightly, are reluctant to make changes when they do not fully understand the implications – and nobody yet fully understands the implications of the IIoT. The elephant in the room though, is the very real benefit that IIoT systems have to offer, particularly in areas like energy efficiency, reliability centred maintenance and supply chain optimisation. So what is a manager to do?
Start small
IIoT solutions are often relatively easy to execute on a small scale. For instance, the SA Instrumentation and Control team were given a demonstration at Africa Automation Fair of supply chain optimisation based on smart monitoring in a point of sale network. The supplier,
knowing how many ‘widgets’ the retailer has in stock after the last delivery, then only needs to call on that customer again when the system detects that ‘widgets on hand’ has fallen below a pre-agreed threshold. Such a system is easy to install and any improvements in
efficiency, for both the supplier and the retailer, are easy to measure because an historical baseline already exists. (The system supplier is 1Worx and you can find more from them in ‘ThingWorx provides insight to automotive parts supplier and ‘ How IIoT can unlock the next wave of Paas’.)
Another example we saw firsthand was a smart silo monitoring system from IoT.nxt. The client was a large mining house and the application involved data collection and analysis to improve silo operation and management. Since the silos are arranged in many ‘clusters’ around the facility, one cluster was selected to test and benchmark the efficiency of the smart system versus the largely manual solution presently used across the rest of the plant. (More from IoT.nxt in ‘The IoT can transform agriculture’.)
Dream big
The beauty in both of these cases is that, like any successful business already knows, the solution, and thus the benefits, are easy to upscale if the trial is successful, and the downside risk is easily limited if they are not. Ergo, an investment in an IIoT solution is only worth considering once both the benefits and the risks to the business are properly understood. (For more on this see Dave Wibberley’s informative article on ‘If there is no significant business benefit IIoT projects are not going to happen’.)
Businesses that are successful today have earned the right to dream big because they understood the power of scalability when they started small; it will be no different in the era of Industrie 4.0 – we hope this industry guide helps you to thrive in it.
Steven Meyer
Editor: SA Instrumentation & Control
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