The Industrial Internet of Things
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) takes networked sensors and intelligent devices and puts those technologies to use directly on the manufacturing floor, collecting data to drive artificial intelligence and predictive analytics.
“In IIoT technology, sensors are attached to physical assets,” says Robert Schmid, Deloitte Digital IoT chief technologist. “Those sensors gather data, store it wirelessly, and use analytics and machine learning to take some kind of action.”
The IIoT is driving unprecedented disruption in an industry that has struggled in recent years due to talent shortages, and this offers hope for the industry’s future. The IIoT can transform traditional, linear manufacturing supply chains into dynamic, interconnected systems—a digital supply network (DSN)—that can more readily incorporate ecosystem partners. As key enablers of DSNs, IIoT technologies help to change the way that products are made and delivered, making factories more efficient, ensuring better safety for human operators, and, in some cases, saving companies a lot of money.
The “Where are my car keys?” application of IIoT.
Another huge benefit of the IIoT is location tracking—the industrial version of a connected fob that makes your keys impossible to lose. Workers can spend a lot of time locating tools, equipment, and finished goods inventory, but the IIoT reduces that time significantly.
“When equipment is built, it goes onto a massive inventory lot that could be three quarters of a mile on each side,” says Schmid. Simply finding equipment on the lot is so time consuming that one of Schmid’s clients saved $3 million per year on each of its production lines once the company’s equipment was outfitted with location-tracking sensors.
Dr. Richard Soley, executive director for the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), which works to test and promote the IIoT, has come across similar findings with his clients. Dr. Soley’s group works primarily through “testbeds”—experimental technology implementations designed to measure how well the technologies really work. One of the IIC’s testbeds involved a client with a massive number of tools that kept getting misplaced.
“The client found that its workers spent 47 percent of their time just looking for the right tools,” Dr. Soley says. “But with an IIoT solution, the worker could be told that the tool they needed was 10 meters behind them and to the left.”
This also meant that the workers didn’t have to spend time putting the tool back where it belonged. Thanks to the sensors, the system will always know where the tool is and will tell workers where to find it.
Safeguarding the communication and data transferred between these devices is imperative to their efficiency and keeping the IT Network of any company implementing such tools safe.
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