Contents Business Value of the Iot and Cloud in Manufacturing
Currently, many manufacturing plants employ machines, sensors, and handheld devices for data acquisition and supervisory control. However, direct, real-time, and bidirectional communication between these machines and devices is daunting because of the restrictions imposed by the variety and incompatibility of their interfaces and communication protocols. Although some proprietary solutions exist, they're expensive, rarely open, and don't allow realtime plant data analysis and delivery of high-value information for instantaneous decision support. In contrast, the IoT provides standards and solutions that are Internet-based and open and that bridge the gap in collecting data from any plant machine or device. More importantly, it supports bidirectional machine-to-machine communication in the plant or anywhere on the Internet. The IoT, when combined optimally with cloud services, allows for real-time computation and delivery of high-value information anywhere. For example, it provides for real-time key performance indicator (KPI) monitoring and prediction delivered to the smartphone of a plant manager or CEO. These advantages are enabling manufacturing plants across the world to gain unprecedented operation effectiveness, increase profits, and reduce costs.
