How Industry 4.0 is a game changer for factory owners

About Webinar

Thanks to technological advancements, manufacturers can achieve real-time production visualization and gain complete visibility into manufacturing operations. The availability of a range of sensors and edge gateways enable enterprises to collect critical production and operational data that can be used to reduce costly downtime and increase production efficiency.

According to Markets and Markets Research, the smart factory market is projected to reach 205.42 Billion USD by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 9.3% between 2017 and 2022.

This webinar will demonstrate the capabilities of IoT and show how manufacturers can reduce operational costs with a predictive maintenance program. Our experts will also show how IoT can bring value to the shop floor and production line monitoring.

The webinar will address many questions such as:

• What are the building blocks of smart factory?
• How can a factory supervisor monitor machine performance remotely?
• How can you generate new revenue streams?
• How to predictive machine failure even before it breaks down?

Webinar agenda

• Difficulties with traditional manufacturing processes and how to overcome
• How Industry 4.0 is a game changer
• The role of IoT and data analytics in the manufacturing industry
• IT/OT Convergence: Why it’s important for IoT adoption
• Current market trends and value
• Smart factory: The evolution not revolution
• Demo and review of smart production line monitoring
• Q&A session

Questions & Answers

The following are the answers to the questions that were asked during the live webinar.

Question 1: We are not sure about IoT implementation in our organization. Can you arrange a small workshop to demonstrate the capability of a smart factory solution?

Answer 1: Yes. We can arrange a workshop and consult you further to get started with IoT. Learn more about our IoT consulting program.

Question 2: Do we need to modernize old system/machines to new one to have such a solution?

Answer 2: You don’t need to update your machines as we can always work with legacy machines by adding smart connectors or smart I/O devices. Furthermore, if machines are too old to support any third-party connectors or I/O devices, then we can use external sensors to acquire data.

Question 3: Can I monitor important KPIs and have analytics on the existing system. I am using SAP.

Answer 3: Yes, our Smart Factory Solution provides external connectivity to popular enterprise applications, e.g., SAP, SharePoint, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, and so on. So you can always take the intelligence generated by our Smart Factory solution and connect back to your existing ecosystem. To get more idea about refer our blog post important KPIs to measure on the production floor.

Question 4: Do we always go with the hardware you recommend, or we can use our preferences?

Answer 4: Being a part of Avnet, we have a wide range of smart devices that can be used in your IoT project; however, our experts will recommend you the right set of hardware.

Question 5: Do I need a specialized in-house team to manage and run smart factory once set up?

Answer 5: Your supervisors can simply monitor production lines performance once the solution is set up. You don’t need a separate team to manage it. However, for software upgrades and security patches or to scale up your solution, you can contact us.

Question 6: How secure are the IoT devices these days?

Answer 6: Connected devices are vulnerable to attack as they are connected to the Internet. But it doesn’t mean that they cannot be protected. To protect data, we follow CPID authentication, OAuth 2.0 authentication, and the concept of tokens in protocols. And with SSL and TLS protocols, we also secure all communications.

Question 7: What IoT platforms do you use?

Answer 7: We use IoTConnect platform that comes with powerful device management capabilities. The platform is completely hardware and infrastructure independent. Also, the micro-services and multi-tenancy based architecture enables users to manage varieties of machinery and equipment, embed sensors and tags associated with the user roles/types and location.