Manufacturing
From small manufacturing companies to Fortune 50 multinational enterprises, we offer services and packaged solutions dedicated to improving your uptime, throughput, and yield.
There is a seismic shift happening across the industrialized world. Manufacturers in virtually every industry are seeking solutions to a number of vexing problems that not only threaten individual companies or sectors, but entire industries, business models, and economies. The pressure of rising manufacturing costs, constrained raw material supplies, and shortened time-to-market for new products, combined with increasingly price-sensitive customers, competition from emerging market suppliers, and rising energy costs, has resulted in narrowing producer margins as cost growth outpaces revenue growth.
Concurrent with these challenges is the relentless march of technology. New advances in communications networks, remote sensing, and data analytics hold the promise to solve some or all of these challenges. Collectively these technologies and the new business models they make possible are referred to as Industry 4.0—following the steam engine, the conveyor belt, and the first phase of IT and automation technology.
Also known as the Smart Factory or the Connected Factory, Industry 4.0 embodies a set of solutions that can increase production agility, increase global competitiveness, and improve sustainability of critical resources, among others. The shift to Industry 4.0, like any revolution, will be disruptive to many and destructive to some. But we believe companies who adopt a systematic strategic approach to the development and deployment of Industry 4.0 technologies will reap significant and measurable benefits in efficiency, productivity, and profitability.
To execute this smart manufacturing vision, enterprise systems must be modified to interface with and monitor IoT sensor-based technology, along with a host of disparate manufacturing, logistics, procurement, order, and other systems. From an IT perspective, the task can be daunting. From a vendor management perspective, there can also be looming challenges, as some vendors will be more prepared than others to participate in the effort.
Realizing the promise of Industry 4.0-style manufacturing requires cooperation and tight integration of data assets and the teams that control them. Teams must carefully architect information flows that draw upon both standard and big data to drive the automation needed to run the factories. If factories are spread across different suppliers and geographies, there will also be a need to import that big and standard data architecture to others who are part of the manufacturing supply chain.
Challenges
Regardless of the manufacturing vertical, every company has a set of challenges that seem to transcend day-to-day operations and persist from year to year. While the specifics may differ by industry, product, or process, the impact on the business, customers, and profitability are undeniable. The seeming complexity and expense of many solutions cause most companies to defer decision-making resulting in institutionalized inefficiencies.
Uptime & Efficiency
One of the primary challenges that every manufacturer faces is how to maximize equipment uptime and efficiency. Driving gains in yield for a given process used to require significant investments in process and system experts at the plant level. Today companies are harnessing the power of analytics at the machine, process, plant, and corporate level to gain new insights into operational metrics, cross-plant comparisons, and interactions between ERP modules. This allows engineers and managers to target specific machines or components for action and improvement with high levels of confidence in the predicted impact on overall process efficiency.
Regulatory Compliance
Every industry has a set of regulations and standards that require tracking and documentation all performed with strict security and privacy safeguards. As the regulatory environment becomes increasingly complex, meeting the myriad reporting obligations can quickly overwhelm an organization that relies on outdated manual processes.
Sustainability
As the global demand for fossil fuels increases, energy costs will continue to put upward pressure on the cost of production. In response companies are exploring alternative energy strategies, energy saving measures, and smart energy technologies to contain energy costs. Having a sustainability strategy can also yield benefits by enhancing a company’s public image around social responsibility.
CapEx Optimization
Properly prioritizing capital expenditure projects can be a significant competitive advantage. Determining which projects will yield the quickest and highest return on investment requires insights that many companies simply do not have. Companies are looking for ways to analyze the performance of past investments and predict the performance of future capital projects.
Benefits
- Actionable, targeted insights for driving OEE improvements
- Support Quality & Lean initiatives.
- Add value and reduce costs by driving maintenance and repair activities on actual usage data. Improve overall plant yield and efficiency by taking production equipment down for maintenance based on live runtime/odometer readings.
- Scalable solutions to meet current needs while providing a path for easy future expansion
- Create a global view of critical metrics across sites to promote best practices throughout the organization.
- Increase data availability and quality to support better decision-making, planning, and regulatory compliance reporting.
- Unify data collection, storage, and analysis to allow true enterprise data visibility.
- Locate, track, and monitor materials and goods anywhere in the value chain.
- Extend the value of existing capital investments to drive better ROI.
- Improve capital planning processes to more efficiently utilize limited capital investment resources.
One Unified Solution – The IOT Technology Solutions Advantage
IOT Technology Solutions believes Industry 4.0 will transform the global economy and impact the lives of every person. Our role in this exciting transformation is to help customers design, deploy, and manage their unique Industry 4.0 vision for their company.
By partnering closely with your executive, product, and technical teams, we help you clarify your vision, define the complete solution stack, and determine a deployment roadmap. Our expert business analysts, process engineers, and technologists have the experience and deep technical knowledge to make your Industry 4.0 project a success.
We apply a simple yet powerful paradigm to create a data-rich smart manufacturing environment:
Sensors + Software + Advanced Analytics = IOT Benefits
Every solution is unique and IOT has developed domain expertise in a wide range of disciplines and capabilities including:
- Continuity
- Security Model
- System health dashboards
- Integration into factory processes
- Configuration processes and controls
- Billing model development
- IoT configuration, in-field configuration
- Interfaces to ERP systems
- User experience design & development
- Alert and notification strategy
- Reporting capabilities
- Choose a hosting solution
- Tech support tools and processes
- On demand diagnostics
- Integration with CRM tools
- Tools and plans for operations management
- Upgrade process
- Deployments and upgrades
- Uptime management
- Scaling
- Backups
Whether you are seeking a comprehensive Industry 4.0 strategy or a point solution to solve a particular challenge, IOT has a breadth of services and solutions to address a wide variety of industries and applications.