Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 20 | Page 84

TECH TALK of the manufacturing and supply chain process. 4. Advanced Manufacturing Automation Fully automated manufacturing and supply chain processes are the ultimate potential enabled by IoT. If asset performance management, guaranteed uptimes and custom apps, are all developments that provide better visibility and insight into manufacturing processes, the next step is control. Instead of information being pushed one way—from device to cloud- based analytics—the reverse flow of information enables devices to automatically adjust their operations based on conditions. IoT devices won’t just be sources of information, but interconnected, remotely-adjustable extensions of intelligent manufacturing. In the end, the holy grail of industrial manufacturing is to have a complete feedback loop between real-time information, analytics, command and control—sensing and responding all via interconnected data streams. Tarik Taman, General Manager IMEA, Infor An End-to-End, Holistic Vision Picture an order change coming into a manufacturer. It arrives via a cloud- based information platform, with an approval by the production manager. The request for changes goes straight to the factory’s production equipment, located across the globe. These smart machines are equipped with chips and sensors that are networked together. Across vast distances, these machines talk to each other, assess one another’s capacity, and coordinate with machines in other geographies to determine the most efficient method to produce the order change. Big Data analytics take into consideration the existing workload, stress and capacity of equipment, the final destination of the goods, transportation costs, delivery times and overall profitability. Then, the entire system automatically optimises operations, and begins altering 84 INTELLIGENTCIO production by pushing control changes right to the smart manufacturing equipment. Any further refinements made on-the-fly are updated across the entire supply chain, so that stakeholders halfway across the world immediately know that their changes are happening. This end-to-end, holistic vision is what IoT brings to industry. Many companies are already experimenting with portions of this long-term vision. And yet, for companies who still haven’t begun, the biggest obstacle remains information-sharing infrastructure. Companies often implement systems with their own four walls of enterprise in mind. Sometimes, it goes further—restricted to a department or a division. But with today’s manufacturing being complex and distributed, and with 80% of supply chain data residing with trading partners, companies need to start thinking of information flow as a multi-division, multi-enterprise problem. This requires creating a data infrastructure that can connect all parts of a manufacturing supply chain together. Once that happens, piloting and experimenting with different IoT projects in smaller chunks becomes easier. By 2025, the total global worth of IoT technology could reach up to $6.2 trillion. Businesses who don’t want to lose out need to start gearing up now. ¡ www.intelligentcio.com