Saturday, August 1, 2015

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the Perfect Storm with MTConnect and Memex


 

I was asked a question by an editor for a manufacturing magazine this past week regarding my thoughts on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).  I stated that IIoT is the upcoming perfect storm of five factors in manufacturing:


  1. Moore's Law being applied to very small yet powerful credit card size computers, such as the Raspberry Pi as well as a plethora of tiny and easy to use sensors.
  2. Open-source prototyping platforms such as Arduino that make it incredibly easy to program a variety of devices have created an excitement in the industrial and commercial worlds. While Arduinos provide excitement, there is a clear need for industrial quality boards in manufacturing that can talk to a wide variety of IIoT devices in a secure and reliable way.
  3. In the world of manufacturing, MTConnect has been the game-changing technology that has driven home the point that you cannot manage what you cannot measure.  The more manufacturers monitor, the more things they want to monitor.
  4.  Monitoring software such as our MERLIN (Memex Inc.'s award winning shop floor monitoring software) that can speak to a wide range of devices and protocols that can provide real-time dashboards with notification triggers and reporting to drive down costs and drive up productivity in a secure and predictable way will be the heart of IIoT. No company does better in talking to the "last meter" than Memex.
  5. Finally, the Holy Grail of IIoT is the ability to tie all of this together by having a flexible enterprise level work flow management software that will effectively act as the 21st century version of ladder-logic that programmatically answers the question, "wouldn't it be cool if we could tie all of these devices together and ..."