DECEMBER 202319INDUSTRY INSIGHTSThis article, although complete in itself, can be viewed as an executive summary of a book on the long and tortuous road to digitizing manufacturing, with each paragraph actually representing the executive summary of a chapter on that topic. It is intended to create a high level awareness in the reader of what she does not know in order not to be blindsided when commencing a project of this nature, and so to be able to ask the right questions. However it also includes lessons the author has learned through hard experience. IIoT is the Industrial internet of things, i.e IoT in industrial applications. It is merely the process of extracting analog data from machines in the factory, converting them to digital data, transmitting the data, storing it, summarizing/compressing/reorganizing/analyzing the data and displaying it. Critical Areas of Operations to be ManagedThe most basic information the factory management looks for is production and efficiency in terms of OEE. There are others. Energy is a critical area, as it is a 'green' cost saving. Quality is a must, i.e monitoring of critical to process and critical to quality parameters. Safety parameters like critical temperatures, pressures, fluid levels, and effectiveness of safety systems. Maintenance is an area where there is very little information and most maintenance is carried out by ad hoc decisions. Monitoring part changes, preventive maintenance activities and machine health monitoring are vital.Functions like work order management which require interaction with the ERP system should reside (in my opinion) in the ERP for reasons that become apparent when we get to security and understanding system architecture. Again for the same reason, control of the machine operation should not be an integral part of this system, but on a separate VLAN, something to discuss while talking about network segmentation.THE ROAD TO DIGITIZING MANUFACTURING: DEMYSTIFYING IIOTBy Sundarram Srinivasan, Managing Director, Lincoln Electric (India)Sundarram SrinivasanManaging DirectorSundarram is an alumnus of IIM Culcatta with handful of management skills, steering the firm towards success as its Managing Director.
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