IIoT or ‘Do I need this?’

Let’s be honest: the more you look into IoT, the more pressing the question becomes, “Do I need this?”. Luckily, Microsoft and IoT Analytics have found out — not on their own, but with more than 500 study participants from companies of all possible sizes and organisational structures. And they’re convinced that IoT and its “industrial variant”, IIoT, make sense. One of the key findings: the future belongs to scalable, automated and service-friendly factories. As if we’d guessed it. And of course, those companies are right. Anyone who cares about keeping their business future-proof should take a closer look at exactly these points.

Do you want a machine, a plant — or an entire factory — that keeps pace with your growth? Or to adjust performance and throughput when business is a bit quieter? Are your customers asking for smaller batch sizes across a wider product range? Scalability means being able to respond quickly and flexibly to changing conditions. The best way to do that is with cloud-based IoT architectures that allow machines or edge devices to be monitored, controlled, updated and expanded centrally. After all, an architecture is the sum of many building blocks — and it’s similar with an IoT architecture. You can also start gradually, for example with one machine and the io-key^®, which already provides the necessary connectivity and cloud environment. Just connect it — and your machine data is in the cloud.

It’s also a great place for automation, because from there the data can be used for all kinds of centralised and decentralised processes that run without manual intervention. That boosts quality and performance and makes you less dependent on the twists and turns of the labour market. After all, the skills shortage is one of the biggest drivers of automation — and automation, in turn, is a key reason many companies get started with IoT.

Maintenance of equipment is also extremely labour-intensive, especially when it is carried out not as needed, but at fixed routine intervals. In addition to staffing effort and costs, this causes downtime due to maintenance work that isn’t actually necessary yet — or, worse still, due to faults and damage that weren’t detected in time. Tips on how to carry out a digital retrofit for condition monitoring with a bit of sensor technology and the right transmission technology — and thus create the basis for predictive maintenance — can be found here in our blog. You’ll learn more about automation and scalability in the next articles. So you can already tell: we think everyone needs IoT …

Source: Microsoft, IoT Analytics (2024): “Accelerate Industrial Transformation: How manufacturers prepare shop floors for a future with AI”