Impact of IoT

For years, traditional factories have been operating at a disadvantage, impeded by production environments that are "disconnected" or at the very least, "strictly gated" to corporate business systems, supply chains, customers and partners. Managers of these traditional factories are essentially 'flying blind" and lack visibility into their operations. These operations are composed of plant floors, front offices, and suppliers operating in independent silos. Consequently, rectifying downtime issues, quality problems and the root causes of various manufacturing inefficiencies is often difficult.

The main challenges facing manufacturing in a factory environment today include the following:

1. Accelerating new product and service introductions to meet customer & market opportunities
2. Increasing plant production, quality and uptime while decreasing cost
3. Mitigating unplanned downtime
4. securing factories from cyber threats
5. Decreasing high cabling and re-cabling costs
6. Improving worker productivity & safety

Industrial enterprises around the world are retooling their factories with advanced technologies and architectures to resolve these problems and boost manufacturing flexibility and speed. A convergence of factory-based operational technologies and architectures with global IT networks is starting to occur and this is referred o as the connected factory.

Connected Factory

As with the IoT solutions for the connected roadways (published in previous article) , there are already large numbers of basic sensors on factory floors. However, with IoT, these sensors not only become more advanced but also attain a new level of connectivity. They are smarter and gain the ability to communicate, mainly using the internet protocol (IP) over an ethernet infrastructure.

In addition to sensors, the devices on the plant floor are becoming smarter in their ability to transmit and receive large quantities of real-time informational and diagnostic data. Ethernet connectivity is becoming pervasive and spreading beyond just the main controllers in a factory to devices such as the robots on the plant floor. In addition, more IP-enabled devices, including video cameras, diagnostic smart objects, and even personal mobile devices are being added to the manufacturing environment.

For example, a smelting facility extracts metals from their ores. the facility uses both heat and chemicals to decompose the ore, leaving behind the base metal. this is a multi stage process, and the data and controls are all accessed via various control rooms in a facility. operators must go to a control room that is often hundreds of meters away for data and production changes. Hours of operator time are often lost to the multiple trips o the control room needed during a shift. with IoT and a connected factory solution, true "machine-to-people" connections are implemented to bring sensor data directly to operators on the floor via mobile devices. this is no longer wasted moving back and forth between the control rooms and plant floor. In addition, because the operators now receive data in real time, decision can be made immediately to improve production and fix any quality problems.

Another example of a connected factory solution involves a real time location system (RTLS). An RTLS utilizes small and easily deployed Wi-Fi RFID tags that attach to virtually any material and provide real time location and status. These tags enable a facility to track production as it happens. These IoT sensors allow components and materials on an assembly line "talk" to the network. if each assembly line's output is tracked in real time, decisions can be made to speed up or slow production to meet targets, and it is easy to determine how quickly employees are completing the various stages of production, bottlenecks at any point in production and quality problems are also quickly identified.