How IoT-enabled Manufacturing Businesses Drive Value And Transform Customer Relations-IoT Service Provider

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is not new in the Manufacturing industry. After the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, many companies started adopting this technology to optimize their productivity and address various associated challenges for decades. However, some of them could not realize full potential of this technology due to their failure of complete integration of the organizational system with IoT and other emerging technologies including Artificial Technology, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Business Intelligence (BI).

If implemented well, IoT is a powerful technology to realize complete digital transformation in the business. Hence, it is imperative that manufacturers unlock several digital capabilities and adopt integration at three strategic levels:

• Horizontal integration through various operational systems that power the organization
• Vertical integration through connected manufacturing systems
• End-to-end, holistic integration through the entire value chain

All scales of manufacturing enterprises need to be well-versed with emerging technology trends driving the growth of IoT, creating new sustainable businesses models, and developing product to become globally competitive in the digital-age manufacturing landscape. It enables them to add more business value and profitable growth across their presence.

Five Key Features of IoT-Enabled Manufacturing Business:

As many manufacturers deal with myriad organizational and technology-driven disruptions impacting the efficiency of their operations, IoT solutions offer ways that can successfully address those challenges. Following are the key characteristics of IoT that makes manufacturing business sustainable, profitable and highly efficient:

1. Connected Value Chain

The most essential feature of the IoT-enabled manufacturing business is the connected value chain. In order to make real-time decisions, manufacturing facilities must have integrated processes and materials to generate the necessary data. IoT applications enable various assets to continuously exchange data sets from both new and legacy systems, and provide updated data that reflects the current condition of the assets. Integration of data from different sources including operations, suppliers, and customers, enables a holistic view of entire upstream and downstream value chain processes that helps in maximizing productivity from available resources.

2. Automated workflows

An automated manufacturing business allows operations to be synchronized and executed with minimal manual intervention, and high efficiency and accuracy. Furthermore, the automated workflows improve tracking of assets and optimize energy consumption- inherent in the smart factory, to increase uptime, productivity, and quality, as well as reduce costs and waste.

3. Transparent data

Transparency at each level of manufacturing operation is one of the most popular features of the smart factory. The real-time data visualizations with easy-to-understand formats can transform data captured from processes and produced products, and convert them into actionable insights, either for human or autonomous decision making. A transparent network of operations ensures greater visibility across the organization that helps enterprises make more accurate decisions using tools like real-time tracking, monitoring, alerts, and notifications.

4. Proactive system

IoT-enabled manufacturing system makes employees and systems proactive to predict and act before problems or challenges such as quality issues, anomalies, replenishing inventory, and monitoring safety and maintenance issues arise. Moreover, enterprises can also enact processes like digital twin, enabling them to digitize a process and move to the next level of automation and integration with predictive capabilities.

5. Agile Business Processes

With agile business processes, IoT-enabled manufacturing businesses are successful in adapting to and adopting new technologies such as RPA and BI. It makes organizations efficient in responding to changing consumers’ patterns and economic factors with minimal intervention. In addition, agility makes the production processes more flexible and increases their uptime while controlling costs and quality.

Key Benefits of IoT for Manufacturing Enterprises:

• Receive and respond to consumers’ feedback proactively
• Optimize supply and reduce costs by monitoring activities across the supply chain
• Narrow the gap between company and consumers
• Improve decision-making by providing up-to-minute, actionable information
• Identify issues such as potential breakdowns before they occur
• Better inventory management by tracking material, equipment, and product as it moves through the supply chain
• Improve workers' safety and security in the plant by monitoring parameters of health and safety.

Contact us to learn more about implementing IoT applications for manufacturing and other businesses.