“This is nothing less than a paradigm shift in industry: the real manufacturing world is converging with the digital manufacturing world to enable organizations to digitally plan and project the entire lifecycle of products and production facilities.”
- Helmuth Ludwig, CEO, Siemens Industry Sector, North America.
The Internet of Things
“There is a lot of embedded intelligence in the devices today. I’m talking down to the field device, motor starters and contacts and relays,” Batra says. “The question is, can you access that intelligence, can you drive further efficiencies of that intelligence so now things that were never available in terms of diagnostic data, the health of a contractor or relay, you can pull in real time?”
The answer to this question rests in the Internet of things -- a loose network of technology that has slowly crept into our personal and professional lives over the past decade, in what Anders Gustafsson, CEO of Zebra Technologies, calls “an exponential explosion of connected devices.”
The Internet of things, Gustafsson says, “basically gives a digital voice or a virtual voice to all of these assets, physical things. That digital voice enables them to communicate something about themselves. It can be what they are, where they are, their condition, their temperature and so forth.”
If properly employed, he says, these interconnected devices form a convergence point between the physical world and the digital world and enable software applications -- like the mesh Siemens’ Ludwig and Batra describe -- to take advantage of all of the information normally hidden in historians or databases or just lost in the digital ether. They enable the system to make smarter and more timely decisions about matters in the real world.
“It is precisely this kind of future-focused innovation and collaboration that is driving cutting-edge manufacturing today,” Ludwig says. “This is nothing less than a paradigm shift in industry: the real manufacturing world is converging with the digital manufacturing world to enable organizations to digitally plan and project the entire lifecycle of products and production facilities.”
In the Amberg plant, this merger between the digital and the real puts product and production at the center of the digital manufacturing process. As described in the Gartner report, “Within the facility are touchscreen human-machine interfaces (HMIs) that allow users to drill down from time-based performance trends to individual product lines, or even individual part levels. This allows tracking not only of performance but also in-depth root cause analysis of the over 400 points of automated data collection.”
This is the real value of the Internet of things, says Gustafsson. “It all comes back to the digital voice -- creating much more visibility into operations and the supply chain by providing a digital, virtual voice to assets that can communicate something about itself to the digital world and enable users to take smarter, timelier decisions.”
To employ that on the broad scale, though, for smart factories to really ramp up production in digital space, and to pull the innovation together and let that new cacophony of digital voices drive efficiency, will require a platform smart enough and robust enough to take on task.
Enter the industrial Internet.
