While the intense pressure to “make big data work for your company” has reduced under the impact of other priorities in industry, the fact that IIoT has the power to transform efficiency and profitability in virtually all applications remains true. No matter what today’s fire drills may be, IIoT plays a significant role in the future of industry. But how can companies make it work? Trying to implement big data strategies with huge, mega-scale, enterprise-wide projects has proved often unaffordable and ends in frustration. It’s time to think small.
Every day, companies are adopting edge technology to cope with individual problems involving specific machines and systems. Need to know why that production line is running slow or a machine has terrible throughput? It’s easy to implement an edge controller or computer and find out. Once you have that knowledge, you can make changes to the machines or systems and improve the throughput. With no major investment, your plant has solved an important problem using edge analysis. What do you do next? Easy. You move on to the next problem and next machine. Once all the problems are solved at the edge, connect all the edge systems together and feed the data to the enterprise. You’ve just master big data.
What this is called is a “little data” solution and a recent article in Drives & Controls magazine from Emerson’s Dieter Gebert and Luigi Ballerio outlines the details. The little data approach can be adopted by any company today and the first step toward mastering big data is at hand. Read the entire article here.