By Giridhara Madakashira
The era of disruptive technologies has dawned and companies are seen determined to adapt, to keep up with the worldwide transformation and simultaneously be driven by customer preference. New challenges come into the picture, as each page of the story unfolds. Business innovation is progressively becoming the key to drive revenues in both the, short and long run. In the phase of transcending customer experiences, when does one execute innovative business ideas? Now, is the time to usher a new business innovation ideas and find unique ways to ensure an effortless revolution – Ways that are both effective and innovative.
Today people are seeing a great revolution in the way the manufacturing ecosystem runs and operates. Industrial internet of things or the industry 4.0 as it is called is the fourth revolution in the manufacturing sector, with the purpose to increase productivity and reduce cost of production and operation. To do so, industries have to adapt to enable better connectivity, analytics, maintenance and performance. Organizations are driving connected solutions with unprecedented levels of performance, which helps render the capabilities towards a consumer technology while it is connected to their enterprise technology and meet the growing demands of a connected world, thereby empowering users and transforming lives.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will transform business at a fundamental level by empowering and allowing enterprises to build smarter and more connected solutions. Once these products are connected, it will allow businesses to pull together more information about product performance, potential failures, tracking consumables and providing constant feedback on the experience.
2016 will witness significant adoption of IIoT in the manufacturing sector when compared to any other industry. In the manufacturing ecosystem alone, the IIoT will play a fundamental role in building a ‘value creation network’. Most organizations have already started witnessing the role of Internet of Things (IoT) in the B2B space opening up the possibility of a change in business model, also facilitating industries to cross-sell and up-sell their products and offerings to their end customers while maintaining/elevating the end user experience. The biggest challenge with IIoT is connectivity with low latency for real time analysis.
At the intersection of art, engineering and technology lies the unique design of a solution that plugs the white space in the journey to better business performance. Whether it is to drive automation, accelerate analytics or become data wizards, the foundation of every transformation initiative is a state-of-the-art technology solution, backed by agile and effective delivery.
Every business needs numerous platforms and frameworks in the foundation to build a successful growth charter. That being said, the scale of evaluating effectiveness of such solutions can be quite perplexing. And that is where defining moments change. The philosophy is simple – At the end of any business transformation, changing and improving lives should remain the prime objective.
The definition of ‘real time’ differs from industry to industry – the real time in the manufacturing world, begins back at the sensor or the moment the data is acquired. The processing has to take place in less than few seconds to alert the system anomalies. Also, security is a big concern. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will play a significant role in India’s manufacturing sector by accelerating innovation and bringing down the cost of production while maintaining higher quality.
Furthermore, Information Engineering being the mainstay of IIoT is crucial for its success, and organizations have consciously invested in Information Engineering (like Big Data and Analytics) capabilities to ensure that they are on the right growth path. They will have to invest in platform engineering and design to address the IIoT demand. Organizations are also taking a platform-centric approach combined with the power of bolt on components, where each and every software component is engineered and capable of mashing up together to address a specific business use case.
With a perfect mix of industry-focus areas, partners and customers, the work metrics of organizations have to shape up to emerge as a hub of ideas, designs and engineering that is intelligent and meaningful. The software components change the competitive game not only by providing the ability to quickly assemble the functionalities but also by providing the flexibility of customization, which results in drastic reduction in time and cost of solution roll-outs.
The industry’s role to boost this new software development paradigm, lies in providing standard integration points and framework for software components (aka Micro Services) to interact seamlessly across the industry verticals. Some of the issues like providing backward compatibility and supporting legacy systems while moving towards the transformation will be a challenge and become a hindrance for greater adoption.
Companies need to believe in The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) as a vital tool and find growth in unexpected opportunities, or risk being left behind. The future is all about measuring four core approaches – boost revenues by increasing production, optimum utilization of intelligent technologies to fuel innovation, create new hybrid business models and transform the workforce. When done right, tomorrow won’t be too late.
The author is principal architect at Altimetrik.