How is IoT Useful in Manufacturing? (Part 1)

Smart manufacturing, Industry 4.0, big data, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) — however you refer to the advent of cloud computing, affordable sensors and connected machines and devices, they are changing manufacturing in profound ways. This blog will outline some of the top use cases of IoT on the plant floor and examines how IoT devices and software will be leveraged for productivity in the future.

How to use IoT Sensors & Machine Data for Remote Operations

IoT has opened the door for a flood of big data with sensors collecting everything from part counts and downtime to motor vibration and temperature. For manufacturers to take full advantage of this, they will need to invest in visualization software. Thankfully, cloud-based solutions like SensrTrx make this investment accessible and easy to implement. What once required thousands of dollars, months of implementation time and costly consultants can now be done in a few days with minimal technical skills.

IIoT shouldn’t be confused with big data all the time, although many think of them as synonymous. A few data points can provide a lot of visibility on the plant floor, so it’s not strictly necessary to have complex IoT platforms and edge computing or even to manage huge datasets. Most IoT analytics needs can be met with business analytics software like Tableau or Power BI these days, but historically ERP and MES have been leveraged to transform the data into something meaningful. Nowadays, purpose-built analytics software like SensrTrx significantly reduces the investment cost of this foundational IoT pillar.

How to use IoT for Smart Maintenance & Asset Management

The standard method for machine maintenance for years has been “run to failure”, with the idea that a certain amount of downtime when a machine was being fixed was acceptable and indeed unavoidable. With IoT however, remote monitoring of machines and conditional reporting means the machine can provide fault warnings and provide your maintenance team with advanced warnings of issues.

Better maintenance using IoT can be viewed in this order:

• Conditional Monitoring
• Predictive Maintenance
• Predictive AI-Driven Maintenance

Source: Sensrtrx