The industrial internet of things (IIoT) is a hot topic, but there seems to be much confusion as to just what bottom line benefits it might deliver to manufacturing organizations. Many look upon it as an untested group of technologies looking for applications. Bob Karschnia, VP of Wireless at Emerson Automation Solutions, explains in his article Connecting to the Cloud to improve operations with IIoT in CXOUSA magazine, why this isn’t the reality.
In Emerson’s view, the IIoT is a logical extension of the work we’ve been doing for years to deliver value to manufacturers. New technologies help improve our IIoT solutions by simplifying implementations and reducing costs. According to our research, there is a $1 trillion opportunity for process plant operators if they move to the top quartile in terms of safety, reliability, production and emissions.
Tremendous amounts of real-time data have been collected in process plants for decades, dwarfing the amount of data collected in other sectors of the economy. A single large refinery might collect more than ten thousand data points per second. What does a plant do with all this data?
The first challenge is making all of this data available to those who need it, both within the plant and outside its walls. But acquiring data and getting it into the cloud are only the first step towards realizing the benefits of an effective IIoT implementation, because data requires expertise in terms of interpretation to realize its full value.
Local experts on premises have been taking on this task for decades, but it has become increasingly difficult at many plants due to the retirement of skilled workers and ever-increasing amounts of data. Today, cloud-based services are at the heart of solutions where a third-party provider—such as Emerson—uses its experts to analyze data and turn it into actionable information. As Bob explains, IIoT is nothing new, but the tools are different.
IIoT implementations have been used for decades in the process industries, but in the past intranets rather than the internet were the only practical networking technology. The advance of internet technologies, particularly cloud-based data storage and processing, has allowed plants to implement IIoT solutions much more quickly and at lower cost, speeding them on their journey to top quartile performance and millions of dollars in bottom-line benefits.