Realizing digital transformation with IoT

• By Andy Rhodes
• Executive Corner

Summary

By Andy Rhodes

Businesses are going digital. Within the next two years, it is expected that a vast majority of all industrial manufacturers will begin implementing digital initiatives. In the report IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Manufacturing 2017 Prediction, research firm IDC predicts that by 2019, 75 percent of large manufacturers will deploy Internet of Things (IoT) and analytics-based situational awareness to reduce risk and increase time to market.

However, several barriers inhibit the adoption of IoT solutions for some. Per the recent study, Defining IoT Business Models, commissioned by Ubuntu (an open source Linux group), more than half of IoT professionals say quantifying return on investment (ROI) and providing a clear use case is the greatest impediment to IoT adoption.

My company helps customers and partners across the globe embrace IoT technologies to transform their businesses. Through strong partnerships in the industrial space, we are seeing IoT adoption and a transition from proof of concept to real ROI.

Here are just a few examples of this trend coming to fruition:

• Emerson Process, a global automation technology provider, helps chemical, oil and gas, and power companies control flow and pressure in process operations via control valves. Their customers need to be able to control valve data through predictive maintenance and Industrial IoT. To address these needs, we developed a new wireless valve monitoring solution and control valve condition monitoring service built on IoT Edge Gateways. The Emerson team can spend more time innovating while we manage their infrastructure.
• Talisen Technologies, a Missouri-based software provider, needed a flexible, reliable network edge device to support its cloud-based building energy management platform hosted inside a data center infrastructure. As a result, the company deployed embedded box PCs to help bring its ESP gateway to market globally. Now Talisen offers its customers a compact, reliable gateway that better supports accurate and robust big data analytics capabilities delivered from a scalable and intelligent converged infrastructure.
• Our PC factory in Brazil recently streamlined quality control in the production line with IoT. The mass customization of build-to-order in manufacturing posed a fundamental challenge for quality control-variability. To overcome this, the factory developed an end-of-the-line quality metric, an IoT-enabled solution that uses real-time analytic capabilities. Today, it has refined the factory's quality-control sampling precision, allowing them to increase quality team productivity by 20 percent and reduce cycle time by 15 percent.

As we look to the future of industrial automation, there will be even greater adoption throughout the industry as companies conclude their pilot projects and transition toward achieving ROI. In fact, a recent report published by Dell Technologies and the Institute for the Future, The Next Era of Human Machine Partnerships, found that emerging technologies, like IoT and big data, will reshape society by the year 2030. When they see IoT yield real business results, organizations across all industries will begin to feel more comfortable with IoT as they begin their digital transformation journey.

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