Impact of IoT in the Manufacturing Industry
Data exchange and sharing are crucial, but sometimes, the purpose of smooth data exchange might get lost due to intermediaries. That’s where IoT comes into the picture. The Internet of Things technology has carved a niche for itself by offering some unparalleled benefits across all industry verticals. It can automate processes, streamline operations, provide better customer service, communicate with stakeholders, and enhance productivity and efficiency.
With the IoT-based mobile app development, data collecting and sharing can be made possible between two machines without any interventions. As a result, organizations can get tons of data on their table, received from sensors and other devices on their machines, and use this data to make sensible, useful business decisions.
According to research, by the end of 2021, more than 35.82 IoT devices will be installed worldwide.
The Internet of Things is the next big thing, and we will discuss it in detail in this blog. Let’s start with what exactly IoT is and how does it work.
What is IoT?
IoT is a network of various physical (two or more) objects or things connected via different mediums such as sensors, software, and other means. The main aim here is to connect and exchange data without the interference of other devices and systems. As a result, businesses hire IoT app development companies to develop IoT apps to help connect their devices to manage processes more efficiently and effectively.
These things or objects might be anything from household devices or industrial tools. As of now, more than 7 billion IoT devices are connected worldwide, and experts predict that the number will reach 22 billion by 2025.
Research shows that one-quarter of Americans own a smart home technology in their homes. Furthermore, it also shows that by 2024, more than 555 million voice assistant devices will reach American households.
Though IoT is all set to enable a digital lifestyle for humans, it will undoubtedly impact the manufacturing industry. Experts believe that IoT can help the manufacturing industry by improving productivity, efficiency and enabling cost-savings. How can that happen? How can IoT help manufacturers to drive smarter and flawless operations? Let’s find out.
How can manufacturers drive smarter operations with IoT?
During the Covid-19 pandemic, manufacturers have significantly invested in IoT to achieve many goals together, such as employee safety, faster processes, developing new revenue streams, and reducing costs. In addition, experts believe that manufacturers will invest heavily in the future to make IoT-empowered solutions to sell their products to consumers. So what can we get with the impact of IoT on the table?
Here is a list of ways manufacturers can drive smarter operations with IoT.
1. Agility
Agility is one of the core drivers of processes and operations. With IoT in place, manufacturers can have operational flexibility and productivity. In addition, manufacturers can also respond timely to demand/market changes and quicker time-to-market to get the competitive edge over rivals.
2. Advanced Operations
With effective data analytics in place, along with process automation, manufacturers will be able to mitigate errors, provide predictive maintenance and enhance the safety measures for their employees.
3. Intelligence
How wonderful is it to have productive insights in advance to make superior business decisions? Effective IoT services can make it happen for you. When you have timely data insights with you, it becomes easier for anyone to make the right decisions related to processes and operations and new product launches, services, new market penetration, and other business aspects. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence can help manufacturers get great insights to speed up their development processes and improve efficiencies.
It is not like everything is as smooth sailing. Some challenges are lying out there for IoT implementation in the manufacturing industry. What are the challenges?
What are the challenges faced while adopting IoT in the manufacturing industry?
Now that we have discussed some fantastic possibilities with IoT, let’s discuss some of the challenges you might face while adopting IoT in the manufacturing industry.
1. Security
Security has been the primary concern among industries, including manufacturing. When you have multiple devices connected, you have more security risks at your doorsteps. Whether you want to adopt IoT-enabled devices for your manufacturing business, or you want to go for IoT mobile app development for a dedicated app for the IoT setup in your unit, you need to ensure that the developers practice the best security measures to ensure no security breaches happen while using the app or device.
2. Return on Investment
When it comes to business, you must mean business. If you want to adopt IoT technology in your business, you have to justify the investment and predict returns. You can use business calculators to help enterprises quantify a business’s benefits by adopting IoT technology. Having a detailed ROI plan for the company will be a welcome step.
3. Technology Fragmentation
Another challenge is technology fragmentation. Here, you need to consider various moving parts such as chipsets, devices, networks, platforms, and applications that must be configured to reap all the benefits the technology has to offer. You need to have an IoT platform that can manage this ecosystem efficiently to improve overall productivity.
During the pandemic, many manufacturing businesses came to know the full potential of IoT technology. Newer concepts such as edge computing solutions and ML and AI work together to offer businesses actionable inputs to better processes and remove any chances of errors.
“As soon as businesses realize the full potential of IoT — from enabling efficiency savings to delivering the needs of individuals — they will transform everything from design to production. Not to mention the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on everyone’s daily lives and how introducing technologies like IoT will enable seamless plant operations while keeping employees protected with fewer people on site. Digital transformation doesn’t come without extra investment, and the manufacturing industry has been on the cusp of a new digital-first era for some years now. However, while a lot of manufacturing organizations have embraced digitization to date, the pandemic may catalyze more wide-scale adoption in this area,” said David Sims, Solutions Sales Specialist at Dynabook Europe.
Now, let’s discuss what the Industrial Internet of Things is and how it can benefit the manufacturing industry.
Introduction to IIOT — What benefit does it bring to the manufacturing industry?
IIoT means Industrial Internet of Things is a sub-domain of the IoT and has been helpful for manufacturing businesses to drive efficiencies and productivity in their processes and operations. With the effective use of IIoT, businesses can mitigate risks such as abrupt outbreaks, operational disasters, conflicts among teams.
Furthermore, with IIoT, manufacturers can get a competitive edge over their rivals by strategizing better for upcoming challenges and hurdles in their processes and improving their growth in revenues. They can also save operational costs and speed up processes. For the IIoT implementation, they need to hire a company offering superior IoT app development services.
Some of the benefits of implementing IIoT in the manufacturing industry are:
1. Improved Inventory Management
Businesses can manage their inventories better by automated inventory-related reports, piling up a list in advance, and better inventory-related decisions.
2. Supply Chain Visibility
You can use a smart IoT app to monitor the supply chain in real-time, get insightful information about each product, and make better decisions. Moreover, you can store this information on the cloud platform for later use too. Thus, you can have better visibility for the supply chain and manage it very brilliantly.
3. Enhanced Product Quality Controls
Quality control is also an essential part of manufacturing. With the best IoT solutions on your sleeves, you can have better product quality control by improving processes and operations and taking extra measures for quality control.
4. Real-time Insights
Businesses can get real-time insights as IoT will bring too much data to the table from various sources. Instead, you can process this data with data analysis tools and get real-time insights to make your processes quicker and make customer-centric products and services.
5. Cost Savings
With the IoT mobile app development solutions, you can reduce the time of product development to a large extent, which will, in turn, lead to superior cost savings.
6. Asset Security
IIoT helps businesses to monitor their valuable and costly assets accurately to avoid any malfunctions. Solutions such as Smart Asset Monitoring can help enterprises calculate their production efficiency and help in asset security.
How would industrial IOT(IIOT) devices impact the manufacturing sectors?
Well, many possibilities are lying ahead. Industrial IoT will bring a paradigm shift to the way the manufacturing industry functions. The new-age manufacturing processes and operations will be more agile, time-saving, automated, and have almost zero risks. In addition, it will bring more real-time insights to the table to make better decisions and improve real-time operational efficiencies.
Some of the impacts that we will see are better maintenance of processes and assets, digitalization of the operations, more flexibility in the system, superior operational intelligence, intelligent predictive analytics, cost optimization, scalability, better inventory management, asset monitoring, etc.
Conclusion
The global manufacturing industry is ready to embrace IoT technology to reap the benefits it offers to enterprises. With effective IoT mobile app development solutions, businesses can speed up and streamline processes and operations, reduce operational risks, provide more safety measures, ensure better decision-making with real-time insights and data analytics, and bring much more scalability and efficiency to the table.
Companies with high-quality IoT app development services can help the manufacturing industry by offering robust, highly secure, and world-class quality IoT solutions that can help automate processes and enable superior data exchange among various devices to skyrocket the growth and revenues of the industry. With the implementation of IoT solutions, the future seems bright and rocking for the manufacturing industry.
