In today's data-driven world, organizations are actively seeking ways to bridge the gap between their operation technology-controlled factory floors and their information technology-hosted enterprise resource planning software. With the goal to remove process waste through the predictive insights of data analytics. By harnessing the power of IoT and big data analytics, smaller teams across organizations can scale their resources and gain a unique competitive advantage quicker. This article explores the commonalities of organizations that have successfully achieved this, the challenges they faced, and strategies used to overcome these challenges. We aim to showcase how adopting a data-first automation mindset can create valuable production insights.
Deploying Big Data Analytics
Currently, only a select number of manufacturing facilities have successfully deployed both IoT technologies and data analytics simultaneously. These facilities were pioneers in removing data silos and have already adopted lean six sigma process measuring methods. They have stable processes with a well defined current state and ideal state based on the voice of the process. These processes also have a high degree of long-run data over a statistically significant lot number sample sets, which can be provided to data analytic software.
However, for most manufacturing facilities, IoT technologies and data analytics have not been deployed together. The majority of these facilities lack a robust data aggregating automation architecture, a strong connection from the device layer to the data storage layer, or a real-time mediation deployment network. This lag between technological inception and widespread industry adoption is not uncommon. Similar delays have occurred in the past, such as the transition from steam to electricity. It took twenty years from the initial promotion of AC current during the 1893 World’s Fair for factories to leverage the technology to create the moving assembly line in 1913.
Read this article in our Integr8 Playbook, “Transformative Synergy: Exploring Big Data and IoT,” here.
