The Mystery of Industrial IoT

November 1, 2017

Fewer than two percent of executives at large organizations say their companies have a clear vision of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), with implementation well underway. That is according to a new report by consultancy Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network, working in partnership with The CMO Council, Penton’s IoT Institute, and The Nerdery.

The study, The Impact of Connectedness on Competitiveness, is based on a global survey of 350 executives from large enterprises. It found that more than half (52%) of executives at large enterprises expect IIoT to have a ‘significant’ or “major” impact on their industry within three years, with another third (32%) forecasting a “moderate” impact in that timeframe.

However, adoption lags behind expectations, with just one in ten respondents characterizing attention and adoption within their industry as “widespread and aggressive.” More than half (53%), meanwhile, report growing interest. When it comes to their own organizations, only 1.5% say their organizations have a “clear vision of IIoT with implementation well underway”, while 29% say they have made a strong commitment, with implementation and pilots just getting started. A further 28% describe themselves as being in the planning stages.

Not a case of rip-and-replace

Ian Hughes, IoT analyst at business and information technology (IT) advisory company 451 Research, suggested that the reason why adoption for IIoT had been slow is because it requires companies to factor in new solutions and combine them with legacy infrastructure and applications.

“This wave of IIoT is around implementing brownfield solutions on plant [machinery] that is already operational, where equipment may have been running for over 30 years. This is not a rip-and-replace environment, such as we see in rapid, IT-based digital transformation,” he said.

“At the same time, many of the machines involved already are heavily instrumented, with standard ways of communicating data in a much richer and granular way than many other enterprises, so these could be said to already be engaged in a degree of IIoT,” he added.

Hughes added that the way data is acted upon and the speed with which it is useful is crucial. “This requires the social and organizational challenge of integrating the world of operational technology with that of information technology,” he said.

Another reason why executives may not have a clear vision could be that because there is a misunderstanding of what IIoT actually means. When asked whether they were content with the current information they can access about IIoT, more than two thirds of the survey respondents said they were not satisfied or were not sure.

From this article it makes me think that it will be up to us to provide outcome based solutions that are clearly defined that show the customers exactly how we can provide increased productivity, increased quality, maximizing uptime, reducing costs etc.etc.

Its all about the applications we present not the mechanism of gathering data and sending it to a cloud base repository to process, its all about the outcomes!

Gescan Industrial/Automation Group is offering PREDIX Edge Insite Solutions:

Edge Insight is a comprehensive monitoring and analytics solution that leverages data from your distributed industrial equipment and turns it into actionable insights.

MACHINE & EQUIPMENT HEALTH:

A Predix enabled, ready-made cloud application that monitors equipment health, including:  Fully configurable data blueprints and asset models. Configurable dashboards and alerts to detect anomalies in asset performance. Condition monitoring with Criticality Analysis helps you focus on critical asset issues. Case Management and Recommendation Management track asset issues and drive timely resolutions.

INDUSTRIAL APPLICATION

DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM:

Equipment monitoring and diagnostics are just the beginning. Predix provides a platform on which you can develop and deploy custom industrial apps that run locally on your Field Agents, and/or remotely on the Predix Cloud. Leverage your unique product and customer knowledge to create new capabilities that can be continuously updated and remotely managed either in the cloud or on-site.

THE ADVANTAGE:

 IIoT computation at the edge improves real-time analytics and further drives business process optimization.

• Edge computing:  conserves network bandwidth and dramatically decreases associated costs. \
• reduces latency by managing, processing, and storing data at the edge.
• increases security of sensitive material by allowing on site analysis

by:  Ivan Romanow, CET Gescan Industrial & Automation Group, www.gescanautomation.com