Transforming Operations by Leveraging Digital and Physical IoT

The Digital Transformation Revolution is well underway, and we see many exciting and innovative IoT executions. While most of our infrastructure already exists, much of it is still outside the connected ecosystem. To reach true scale as an industry, our efforts will need to bend toward bringing IoT into these physical spaces.

To start, let’s take a look at Industrial IoT (IIoT) and manufacturing in particular. For the last decade, manufacturing processes have been becoming more efficient, data has been moving into the cloud for processing, and new profit centers have been materializing, all thanks to the implementation of IIoT solutions. That path makes it easy to see a future of automated, efficient, and dynamic manufacturing infrastructure as the norm. It ripples through the rest of society and will radiate out from there. 

Adopting Smarter Solutions

Now that begs the question: What is IIoT waiting for? Why are some in the manufacturing sectors especially slow to adopt smarter solutions?

There's some hesitancy about technology and interoperability. We're in the first phase of Digital Transformation when people are just starting to connect their piece of the supply chain. Over time, they will see the systems talking to each other online, and then we will see the compounding effect. 

Those effects can become exponential quickly, as many IoT implementers have seen. The industry is at an inflection point: A place where we haven’t started to see the real hockey stick growth yet, but it seems to be emerging.

Connectivity

Leading companies are already moving to advance the inflection point. There's more to connectivity than 'connectivity.' It’s more than just connectivity in one place - all places, across all networks, to give you the best performance in potentially challenging environments, such as industrial manufacturing floors. It would be best to have a partner who will always provide access to the correct network at the right time for mission-critical operations.

Those connectivity partners have a crucial role in making IIoT successful. They need to provide ubiquitous connectivity and a way to manage the devices that are connected. It would be best if you had a way to give operators granular control over the edge. Connectivity is only half the battle. It would help if you gave them visibility into their machines so they can operate their fleet. 

Connecting objects in the physical world to the digital is not a trend, but a necessity, and manufacturing is only one manifestation of that. Processes are becoming increasingly digitized, especially in very hands-on sectors like billing and inventory management. And that means that there are ever-increasing numbers of devices that require ubiquitous connectivity to both digital and physical IoT.