How to Balance the IIoT Success Equation

What are the key components to being successful when implementing Industrial IoT? There are three major components to consider when beginning your pilot project for Industry 4.0: Strategy, Data & Action. With a clear understanding of each of these components, successful implementations are closer than you think.

Strategy: What is your plan? What do you need to know? Who needs to know what? How do we enable people to make the right decisions? What standards will we follow? How often do we need the data? What data don’t we need?

Data Generation: Devices need to generate cyclic data giving insight into the process and warning/event data to give insight into issues. Devices should support protocols that allow requesting data without impacting the control system and structured in a way that’s logical and easy to manipulate.

Data Management: How are we going to handle our data? What structure does it need to be in? Do we need internal and external access to the data? What security requirements do we need to consider? Which users will need the data? Where is the data coming from? How much data are we talking about?

Data Analytics: Insight, Big Data, Predictive Analytics, etc. These insights from an industrial point of view should truly drive productivity for every user. Predictive Analytics should help us know when and where to perform maintenance on equipment and dramatically reduce downtime in the plant.

Action: The key component of any IIoT Success. Without daily decisions based on the strategy by every employee, failure is assured. Supply chain needs to know that we are interested in not just the cheapest replacement component, but one that can help us generate data to improve our analytic capabilities. Maintenance needs to be taking action on Predictive outputs and move from randomly fighting fires to purposefully preventing downtime all together.