Manufacturing has been one of the eldest and most stable industry since the modernization in human society kicked off. It always develops with urbanization and infrastructure as the major supplier for goods and materials that lay down the foundation for our daily life.

Despite its widespread usage and endless sources of demand, nowadays, manufacturing industry is facing great challenges as the market competition and production costs are flaring, leaving manufacturing enterprises at a critical point to decide their way to an urgent and imminent transformation.

To manage manufacturing equipment with real-time data collection

Asset management is the first problem coming up on stage for transformation. A manufacturing enterprise usually has tons of machines that it needs to manage. These machines are usually spread across countless processes. Some of them can be difficult to lay an eye on due to their locations and surroundings.

The key to machine management is to acquire its real-time data, which can be extremely costly if done by hand, as is the case with many manufacturers. Sometimes, the field where the machines are operating can be very unfavorable, dirty or even dangerous, greatly increasing the labor cost if the personnel need to access it by hand from time to time. Even if they can access the machine, some of the data cannot be extracted by engineers or common devices.

Under this circumstance, production and operation are not transparent enough for engineers so they cannot make the correct decisions. To increase the efficiency of production, process and machines to cut down the costs, manufacturing enterprises need a new platform, supporting convenient, accurate and timely management of their assets.

To analyze and utilize manufacturing data with more professional IoT support

The second difficulty can be tricky. Even when manufacturers can access machine real-time data, how to utilize these data becomes a real headache. Most manufacturing enterprises are short of professional IT technicians to help them build up an adequate platform to handle these collected data since the logic and control of these data can be really complex.

For example, a manufacturer may acquire the abnormal parameters from a machine when it is malfunctioning, but he cannot tell specifically what kind of failure it is because the data they obtain can be raw and difficult to analyze. To make data more understandable, they need to divide the failure data into more defined ranges and categorize data into each section. Then, the correct response to each category should be set up to finally turn the data into a single alarm with a very defined range. Only then can engineers get a clear picture of the situation.

However, the logic of setting and analyzing the alarms requires very specialized resources in both software and hardware to bring the two parts together to find the best way of connecting them. This poses great challenges for manufacturing enterprises. Solving the hardware problems can already take a great deal of efforts of them and to bring together hardware and software will be a dream if they only make use of the resources within their enterprise or industry.

To manage manufacturing value-added services on a brand new platform

However, the logic of setting and analyzing the alarms requires very specialized resources in both software and hardware to bring the two parts together to find the best way of connecting them. This poses great challenges for manufacturing enterprises. Solving the hardware problems can already take a great deal of efforts of them and to bring together hardware and software will be a dream if they only make use of the resources within their enterprise or industry.

To handle these new services, manufacturing enterprises usually run out of ideas. On one thing, a new service requires a new platform that consists of a mechanism totally different from the original one of manufacturing enterprises; on the other, value-added services can wear out of a manufacturing enterprise for their complex processes, especially if there are too many value-added services that the enterprise need to take up against the fierce competition in the market. A platform with comprehensive functions and advanced solutions is greatly needed to improve their competitiveness.

Nonetheless, more and more manufacturers are finding their correct path of transformation by adopting IIoT technology. The superior capabilities of IIoT help them solve the problems such as those in data interconnection, real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance and remote operation, leading them to a much more efficient and healthy model of business development.

Transparent Factory, a proved advanced IIoT platform offered by ROOTCLOUD featuring the most high-end modeling, data integration and digital twin technologies, has already helped a lot of manufacturers solve the problems mentioned above, and is looking forward to bringing more and more enterprises into the new era of manufacturing.