Traditional factories have long been operating at a disadvantage due to their disconnected production environments, which are often difficult to monitor and rectify.
The main challenges facing manufacturing today include accelerating new product and service introductions, increasing plant production, quality, and uptime while decreasing cost, minimizing unplanned downtime, securing factories from cyber threats, reducing high cabling and re-cabling costs, and improving worker productivity and safety.
These challenges often need to be addressed at various levels of the manufacturing business, such as executive management seeking cost-effective ways to manufacture while balancing rising energy and material costs, plant managers focusing on plant efficiency and operational agility, and the controls and automation department ensuring complete visibility into all systems.
Industrial enterprises worldwide are retooling their factories with advanced technologies and architectures to resolve these problems and boost manufacturing flexibility and speed.
This convergence of factory-based operational technologies and architectures with global IT networks is starting to occur, known as the connected factory.
IoT solutions are transforming the number of basic sensors on factory floors, making them more advanced and communicating over the Internet Protocol (IP) over an Ethernet infrastructure.
This allows for real-time informational and diagnostic data transmission and reception, reducing the need for operators to travel to control rooms.
An example of a connected factory solution is a real-time location system (RTLS), which uses Wi-Fi RFID tags to track production as it happens. By tracking each assembly line's output in real time, decisions can be made to speed up or slow production to meet targets, and it is easy to determine how quickly employees are completing various stages of production.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the fourth Industrial Revolution, moving manufacturing from a purely automated assembly line model to one where machines are intelligent and communicate with one another. This wave of Industry 4.0 takes manufacturing from a purely automated assembly line model to a model where machines are intelligent and communicate with one another.
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