In few other industries are there so many opportunities to use the I-IoT than in manufacturing. In this field, it can be used to connect the physical and the digital, and build assets such as machines or production and non-production objects. It can also be used to create a variety of product and manufacturing process parameters as part of a vast information network. With manufacturing, we typically tend to think about goods and products, but the bigger opportunity for manufacturers lies in cyber-physical systems (https://www.i-scoop.eu/industry-4-0/#The_building_blocks_of_Industry_40_cyber-physical_systems), a service economy model, and the opportunities that are presented through exploring data. It is estimated that in the future, successful companies will be able to increase their revenue through the I-IoT by creating new business models, improving their productivity, exploiting analytics for innovation, and transforming the workforce.
The following is a list of several I-IoT use cases in manufacturing and their benefits:
- Manufacturing operations: This includes all operations typically performed by the manufacturing execution system (MES) that can take advantage of end-to-end visibility, such as planning, production optimization, and supplier management.
- Asset management: This includes production-asset monitoring, and tracking and monitoring parameters areas, such as quality, performance, potential damage or breakdowns, bottlenecks, and so on.
- Field service organizations: These are an important driver of growth, and, obviously, of margin. It's clear that having a hyper-connected, hyper-aware, digitized and IoT-enabled manufacturing ecosystem marks a company out.
- Remote monitoring and operation: This optimizes flow, eliminates waste, and avoids unnecessary work in the process inventory to save energy and costs.
- Condition-based maintenance: This is important to optimize machine availability, minimize interruption, and increase throughput.
- Big data: Big data can be used to monitor the quality and the makeup of services and enhance the outcome of this aggregated data.
Ultimately, all of these use cases highlights that data plays a key role. In the next few chapters, we will see how the data that comes from sensors and other industrial equipment is gathered and how big that data can be. Manufacturers who use this data can bridge the gaps between the planning, the design, the supply chain, and the customer of a particular product. In addition, thanks to this strong integration, shared data and information islands of automation can be easily linked together.