The arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – Industry 4.0 – is affecting every industry, disrupting current leaders and creating new business opportunities. Surviving this disruption and remaining competitive in an increasingly connected world requires companies to turn to digitization – using digital technologies to transform business operations. Becoming a digital enterprise in the manufacturing industry means taking advantage of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to centrally collect, analyze and visualize all data across products, plants, systems and machines.
By combining data from physical assets and enterprise systems, companies have unprecedented visibility and control over industrial assets. However, industries undertaking IIoT initiatives face the distinctive challenge of unifying assets that have no standards or universal method to connect. Linking disparate assets that have different protocols quickly, affordably and securely has been a defining obstacle for industrial manufacturers.
But companies that have managed to incorporate IIoT technologies have seen their profitability increase. IIoT leads to transparent and optimized operations, gains in productivity, reduced risk and the development of new business models with the implementation of condition monitoring, predictive/prescriptive maintenance, asset performance management, inventory management and complete digital twin precise digital models of products and production operations.