Data acquisition
been a shift as leading manufacturers have started to implement Industry 4.0 across their networks. With UK manufacturing output currently flat according to the Confederation of British Industry, now is the time for more manufacturing businesses to embrace the benefits of digital transformation to drive growth and remain competitive.
U
As exciting as the fourth, digitally-powered industrial revolution might be, there is still the opportunity for the manufacturing industry to embrace its full potential. While automation and interconnectivity are becoming more common across factory floors, they cannot run on empty. The heart of these technologies remains largely untapped: data. With factories increasingly relying on IoT devices, robotics, and artificial intelligence, manufacturing companies have more data than ever to inform and improve their business decisions. Making best use of a goldmine of data is key to gaining deeper customer insights, achieving better product design, and improving plans for production cycles, whilst keeping rampant data costs in check. Implementing mature data strategies that use the entire network of multiple clouds in the smart factory are crucial to achieving this.
MASTERING THE MULTITUDE OF DEVICES Smart factories are only getting smarter as more devices become integrated into the production line. Among the most popular are Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which are expected to increase from 17.7 billion in 2020 to 36.8 billion in 2025. Benefits such as remote asset monitoring, reduced down-time, and predictive maintenance are driving growth.
Aside from these immediate benefits, the more connected devices there are, the more data there
K manufacturers have long believed in the benefits of data and analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Over the last few years especially, there has
INDUSTRY 4.0:
WHY HARNESSING THE POWER OF DATA IS KEY TO SUCCESS
is from which manufacturers can draw insights. For example, data enables manufacturers to gain a holistic view of trends and identify areas of improvement on site, or where to find additional efficiencies through detailed monitoring. It is critical to ensure data collected isn’t left forgotten to ensure future innovation.
EDGING CLOSER TO INSIGHTS The exponential rise of IoT devices means a company’s data is often stored at the edge, since processing there provides faster time to value. Edge computing also enables real-time insights across a manufacturer’s facilities and supply chain. For example, manufacturers can closely monitor warehouse conditions for delicate products like medicines and food items where strict requirements must be met. But ‘under the hood’, it also shifts the centre of data gravity. This refers to where the largest and most important datasets reside, but also how they attract other applications and services,
By Jeff Nygaard, executive vice president of Operations and Technology at Seagate
and consequently how easy they are to migrate. Any information an enterprise uses to make decisions will imbue that data with gravity, so data must be in a location that’s accessible to those making the decisions. To put this into context, only 10 per cent of enterprise data was created and processed outside the datacentre in 2018. However, that amount is projected to grow to 75 per cent by 2025.
This poses a challenge for manufacturers that rely on a centralised location for their data. There needs to be a careful balance of managing the data at the edge that informs real-time decision making in facilities, with the data that is aggregated centrally for long-term business planning. In practice, this forces manufacturers to move large data workloads from edge devices to a centralised cloud on a regular basis to get the most out of their data. This ‘to and fro’ cannot be an ad hoc process. It must form a part of a wider multicloud strategy that keeps costs in check, is scalable, and lowers barriers to innovation.
44 March 2023 Instrumentation Monthly
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82
