This demonstration IoT manufacturing project hits my buttons!
I love IoT-enabled manufacturing (what I call “precision manufacturing“) and I REALLY love companies (such as GE, at its Durathon battery plant) that eat their own dogfood by applying their IoT technology internally. Gotta walk the talk!
That’s why I was happy to learn how Intel is applied its own IoT technology to its own factories. In the accompanying video, Intel VP for IoT operations and group marketing Frank James says:
“The real opportunity is how to combine … data differently, which will ultimately give you insights not only into how your factory is running but, what’s more important, will let you predict how your factory will run the next minute, the next hour, the next shift, the next day.”
The pilot factory automation project is a collaboration with Mitsubishi Electric (more points for a key IoT “Essential Truth” — collaboration!). The project, at Intel’s Malaysia manufacturing facility, combines two critical components, end-to-end IoT connectivity and big data analytics. The benefits were impressive: $9 million in cost avoidance and improved decision making, plus:
- improved equipment uptime
- increased yield and productivity
- predictive maintenance
- reduced component failures.
That hard-to-quantify improved decision making, BTW, is one of the things that doesn’t get enough discussion when we talk about IoT benefits: decision-making improves when there is more data to consider, more people to analyze and discuss it simultaneously (not sequentially, as in the past), and when you’ve got tools such as data dashboards to allow visualizing the data and its patterns.
The companies plan to roll out the services commercially this year.
Here are the specs:
“Using an Intel® Atom™ processor-based IoT gateway called the C Controller from Mitsubishi Electric’s iQ-Platform, Intel was able to securely gather and aggregate data for the analytics server. Data was then processed using Revolution R Enterprise* software from Revolution Analytics*, an analytics software solution that uses the open source R statistics language, which was hosted on Cloudera Enterprise*, the foundation of an enterprise data hub.”
