How to recharge manufacturing with IoT

By Badrinath Setlur, Assistant Vice President, Enterprise Application Services Consulting, Cognizant

The Internet of Things represents a scenario in which every object is embedded with a sensor and is capable of automatically communicating its state with other objects and automated systems within the environment. Each object represents a node in a virtual or wired network, continuously transmitting a large volume of data about itself and its surroundings.

Products built with this capability are often referred to as the new breed of connected products. Examples include smart grid, connected cars, and networked and connected factories.

IoT holds immense potential and promise throughout the value chain across multiple segments of the manufacturing and logistics industries ― transportation and logistics, energy and utilities, and automotive. In the transportation and logistics industry, for example, as products with sensors and embedded tags move across the supply chain, their transmitted information interacts with various partner and in-house systems in warehouses and distribution centers. The flow of material can thus become completely transparent. Various key decisions can be made much more quickly and effectively using information captured by readers through the supply chain. The process can even be made completely autonomous.

Furthermore, a range of possibilities across core functional and process areas also exists, such as in connected supply chain, plant floor control automation, remote monitoring and management of critical assets, energy management and resource optimization, and proactive maintenance.

These possibilities are only limited by the ability of organizations to derive meaning from the vast amount of granular time-stamped data generated by embedded sensors in products and equipment. At the same time, there are also numerous challenges that must be addressed before the full potential of IoT can be realized. These include:

• Standardization: IoT applications are often created for specific purposes within a particular domain and offer limited applications in other areas. Interfaces should therefore be made uniform at various levels, and across various platforms, to promote integration and scalability.
• Security and Privacy: With hyper connectivity, the data associated with IoT goes from big to colossal and from high-velocity to supersonic, and it works across multiple categories, thus endangering security and privacy. It becomes important that devices be secured on the network.
• Infrastructure: IoT requires complex interconnection between hardware and software. The impact, particularly on data storage, seems obvious; with so much data being captured and transferred, organizations need much more capacity to store the information.
• Analytics: Organizations will need to master the art and science of converting the data acquired into actionable insights. This will likely be the biggest challenge for many manufacturers, given the growth of Internet of data. According to estimates by Stanford University, the world generates around 1,200 exabytes per year. Further, data generation is expected to grow at 40% per year, which will result in 35 zetta bytes by 2020 equivalent to 1,000 Empire State buildings filled with 64GB USB drives.

No wonder that organizations are investing in getting things on the Internet, as they see the potential for generating business-critical insight from this data. While the challenges can be overwhelming, the following steps can be taken by organizations to address them:

Step Zero : Analyze sensory architecture and assess the embedded sensors already in products. Benchmark the product configuration with competitive offerings. Assess component/subassembly supplier parts range for embedded sensors. Carry out humans-in-loop evaluation for products and services.

Step 1: Create an IoT vision tailored to the organization. Evaluate ROI based on revenue models, efficiency savings and product dif­ferentiation. Design a blueprint for the organization’s connected ecosystem, including suppliers, dealers, connected workforce and partners. Outline a customer experience design for achieving the IoT vision.

Step 2: Initiate engagement and employee communication. Engage and integrate employees, customers, process owners, operators and partners into the IoT program. Communicate with all stakeholders to solicit feedback on touch-points and po­tential benefits to make it a win-win for all stakeholders involved.

Step 3: Focus on application development and infrastructure. Evaluate potential proliferation of personal connected devices within differ­ent stakeholder communities. Create a BYOD (bring your own device) implementation plan (if one does not already exist), since this helps to prioritize employee-based applications. Decide on a common approach to development and deployment across mul­tiple devices.

Step 4: Drive rapid deployment, monitoring and modification planning and agile and flexible deployment with small, step-by-step implementations. The key is to get started with IoT and achieve incremental benefits.

Step 5: Develop innovative new product features and embedded sensors.

With these steps, organizations can jumpstart their IoT journeys and build competitive differentiation in the marketplace.

IoT promises a new era of automation and data-enabled decision making to create new business processes and revenue models. Intelligence is beginning to move to the edge with concepts such as fog computing, which is about facilitating real-time control and analytics with millisecond response times. The proliferation of low-cost sensors and communication on-cloud/on-premise IoT platforms with networking, computation and analytics capabilities from leading vendors are bringing us closer to the vision of an IoT, where the sensing and actuation functions seamlessly blend into the background and new capabilities are made possible through access to new and rich information sources.