How IoT Has Changed Manufacturing

No doubt you’ve heard a lot about IoT – the Internet of Things. But you may be wondering what it is. It’s in your car, possibly your fridge, and might be in your thermostat, oven, or toaster, too. It’s a means for appliances, machines, seemingly stand-alone objects to be connected wirelessly through the internet to each other, to other machines, or of course to your phone or laptop. The IoT wirelessly connects devices which can be as simple as your toaster or as complex as precision machinery. It’s what enables you to turn on your furnace remotely; to tell your oven from the car to warm up; to turn on the TV before you open your front door.

Items attached to the IoT each have a unique identifier (UID) that enables them to send data or commands wirelessly – you don’t necessarily have to participate! IoT is a high-tech version of automation that is more and more common in many different applications. And it’s an incredibly effective tool for the manufacturing industry. Here we’ll explore how IoT has impacted manufacturing and what it can do for you.

Improve Equipment Tracking

If you are in manufacturing, you know that tools – whether handheld, laptops, computer-guided machinery, or even company-issued cell phones – are essential ingredients of your company. How do you maintain your inventory? Who’s keeping the checklist? How are you safeguarding your equipment? And how do you know what’s available, underutilized, overutilized? You can reduce the time you spend on these tasks with Industrial IoT (IIoT). Using IIoT, each tool in your inventory has a unique identifier (UID) stored in your company’s wireless network. When someone needs a tool or piece of equipment, they’ll know exactly where it is when they query its location – because your IIoT will identify its location through its UID. Tools can be located efficiently, underutilized tools can be logged, and overutilized tools can be documented – making it faster and easier for you to assess what you need more or less of and saving you time and costs – exactly what manufacturers need now more than ever.

Lease Rather Than Purchase

IIoT can also help companies improve their bottom lines through leasing, rather than outright purchase of industrial equipment and machinery. How would this improve profit margins? By reducing a company’s costs in maintenance, upgrades, and repairs. When you own your own machinery, you’re responsible for maintaining it, which means someone has to monitor, log, predict, and apply regular maintenance. But when you lease machinery connected to the lessor through the IIoT, the lessor monitors the equipment and machinery and is responsible for ensuring that upgrades and computerized maintenance is done remotely.

Built-in sensors convey the day-to-day operating conditions of the machinery and alert the lessor and lessee to potential problems, whether wear of critical parts, out-of-range temperatures, problematic vibration, or a host of other conditions. Those built-in sensors can also apply predictive maintenance algorithms to prevent equipment downtime by “knowing” in advance when maintenance must take place. Your productivity goes up and costs are lowered because human intervention isn’t required to monitor, maintain, log, and upgrade—it’s all done through the IIoT

Monitor the Manufacturing Environment

An additional key benefit to IIoT is how it can use data loggers across an entire supply chain to monitor conditions throughout the manufacturing process. You can program data loggers to regularly monitor and record temperatures, humidity, and pressure. That data can then be transmitted in real-time through the IIoT to a remote location for further analysis. Companies such as Dickson offer cloud-enabled data loggers that can be programmed to alert personnel of fluctuations that may impact the manufacturing. Using data loggers together with IIoT can assist companies in maintaining compliance and help them reduce costs and product losses. And a series of what may seem like small efficiencies ultimately mean lowered costs and improved profit margins making for an efficient workplace.

Use Predictive Maintenance

As mentioned earlier, predictive maintenance of machinery is a huge benefit to manufacturers. When computerized sensors monitor equipment, they remove the guesswork of when maintenance needs to happen. Sensors can track the use and condition of every piece of essential equipment and, through the IIoT, automatically alert you to emerging conditions that may soon require a line-stoppage or equipment downtime. Preventing equipment breakdown and keeping manufacturing processes going by using sensors and the IIoT is a huge plus for your company.

Increase Productivity

When you connect warehouse equipment or machinery and equipment on the manufacturing factory floor to an IIoT, you improve workflow and productivity. Why and how? IIoT helps workers find the right tool for the job more quickly and efficiently, and, with sensors, can automatically adjust that machinery for the task it’s being used for. This type of automation sees jobs completed more quickly and greater daily productivity; workers don’t have to spend time finding the right equipment in enormous warehouses – a catalog of equipment and their locations is available immediately through the IoT. You’re creating cost-savings for your company and improving its bottom line.

Why Turn To IIoT?

Today’s US manufacturing industry is a far cry from where it was even 20 years ago. The numbers of skilled workers have declined; much-needed environmental restrictions have developed; the cost of raw materials only increases. These would seem to ring the death-knell of manufacturing. But automation and automated processes, whether robotics or IIoTs, are actually helping manufacturers reduce costs that once seemed untenable, making it clear that using IIoTs is good fiscal sense.

Once a company converts to using IIoT, the power of wireless communication among workers and objects can transform its manufacturing systems into connected systems known as Digital Supply Networks (DSN). And DSNs are seamless and can be adapted to easily accommodate additional business and manufacturing partners.

Manufacturing uses an incredible array of materials to create a huge variety of products. If the materials might deteriorate under certain environmental conditions or are sensitive to those conditions, it pays to use data loggers and to include them in your IIoT. Data loggers monitor the environments that materials are stored in, and they give you reliable and accurate information about those conditions. They can alert you to whether your materials might degrade by informing you of changes in temperature, humidity, or pressure. Make data loggers part of a DSN so you can collect real-time information on your automated system. Every manufacturer is looking at improving costs and profit, and data loggers integrated into your IIoT and DSN should be part of the equation.

In Conclusion

Technology has brought dramatic changes to the manufacturing industry, not only by improving the speed, safety, and reliability of manufacturing, but by supplying new, sophisticated tools that help you improve all phases of the manufacturing process. IIoT helps save you time and money and is just one way that you can leverage new technology to improve every step of yourmanufacturing processes. From better tracking of tools and equipment to monitoring temperature and humidity to predictive analytics that keep your machinery humming to fully computerized inventories of products and improved ability to predict product completion, IIoT has changed how we do business and is helping manufacturers reduce costs, improve quality, and compete on the global economic stage.