Digital enterprise initiatives and innovations have been already proved to be successful solutions for sustainability and efficiency of manufacturing processes around the world. The challenges driven by the Covid-19 pandemic have even emphasized enterprises more to invest in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and other sets of advanced technologies such as cloud platforms, Business Intelligence (BI), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to transform companies’ legacy operations throughout their entire value chain. It helps them in reinventing their business models and boosting productivity with increased efficiency, and reduced cost and cycle time. Trends from the previous Industrial Era, 4.0 remain relevant at present. However, advanced manufacturing processes equipped with automation and analytics technologies have recently gained traction as a viable pursuit for long-term growth.
Today, leading businesses are adopting new as well as scaling their existing IIoT-enabled use cases to achieve significant operational and financial advantages. The convergence of advanced technologies supports the creation of new, digitally-enabled business processes and helps improve operational excellence and customer experience. Manufacturing enterprises that want to sustain and grow in the digital-age competitive market cannot ignore these benefits; not only large but also small organizations in this space are already leveraging these technologies to deal with changing economic and social manufacturing scenarios.
The successful manufacturing business represents the transition from more traditional automation to a fully connected and flexible system. It enables enterprises to leverage constant upstream and downstream data from connected operations and production processes, and predict business outcomes in a more realistic way. Moreover, an IoT-enabled manufacturing business can integrate data from different systems and physical assets to drive innovations and productivity across the entire manufacturing network. As a result, businesses become more adaptive and efficient systems coupled with less production downtime that helps them in leading their position up in the competitive marketplace. Here are Top IoT trends driving toward Smart Manufacturing Business:
Due to limitations in digital technology capabilities, as well as high implementation costs and other challenges, the realization of an advanced IoT-enabled manufacturing business remained elusive in the past. However, the evolution of new technologies like artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, and machine learning themselves have grown more sophisticated capabilities. It enabled systems to communicate, interpret, and learn from the data gathered from connected organizational systems. This ability allows manufacturers to move beyond connectivity toward more task automation and complex data analysis.
Global manufacturing business and different stages of production at various facilities and suppliers across multiple locations are making the supply chain more complex. This trend coupled with increased consumers’ demand for local, regional, and even individual personalization, rapid demand fluctuation, and limited resources has impelled manufacturers to implement IoT solutions in their value chain. These solutions empower them to streamline supply chain processes, and be agile and proactive along with increased efficiency.
The rapid growth of advanced digital technologies has been ushered due to new-age competitors who are leveraging digitization and lower costs of entry to reach new markets and industries where they previously were not present. They are transforming their legacy assets and reducing dependence on manual-intensive processes to increase their profitability and create new business lines. This trend is impelling traditional manufacturers to invest and adopt IoT technology choosing trusted IoT service provider like Eastern Software Solutions.
The increasing convergence of IoT and RPA has made it possible for organizations to automate time-consuming and manual-intensive work processes resulting in realignment of operations. IoT technology helps manufacturers to gather valuable data for the execution of industrial automation. Then, that data is turned into insight, and insight into action through BI Tools. This shift of enterprises towards digital technologies gives them the ability to analyze and act upon gathered real-time data more efficiently.
Due to multiple challenges associated with workforce that include an aging workforce, increasing labor costs, and scarcity of workers interested in manufacturing roles, many traditional enterprises have been facing difficulty in finding enough labor to keep their operations running at optimized level. Hence, manufacturers are seeking to adopt digital technologies to mitigate the risk associated with the labor shortage. This digital transformation further also helps them to up and down their production level in fluctuating demand situations.
The evolution of advanced future-proof digital technology capabilities accelerates manufacturing businesses’ capability to adapt to changes in ways that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to do so before. It becomes clear that digitally advanced manufacturing businesses go beyond simple connection, automation and analysis. These new-age businesses are a flexible system that can optimize productivity with increased speed and accuracy across the organizational network.