Nobody needs much of a lesson in the industrial revolution this year; given the COP26 climate summit (26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties) and the focus on how private and public enterprises are contributing to carbon emissions, the need to examine how we build the world’s work systems has never been greater.
Given ERP’s core functional role in enterprise operations that host industrial manufacturing facilities, now is also a good time to think about how Internet of Things (IoT) implementations can be further enhanced for production efficiency and now, more crucially than ever, environmental efficiency.
Aiming to target this precise pain point is real-time streaming analytics company KX. The company has partnered with IoT specialist Telit to build an enterprise-grade industrial analytics platform that combines KX’s real-time performance streaming analytics capabilities with Telit’s deviceWISE Industrial IoT platform.
Microseconds in-the-moment
The companies talk about enabling what they call true ‘in-the-moment microsecond decision making’ in the workplace.
This is achieved by bringing together low-latency connectivity technologies and and analytics in one integrated solution.
Already deployed at a large manufacturing site in Europe, the joint solution enables manufacturers to enhance operational performance by applying advanced AI models to all production data regardless of type of machine or format of data.
This integration of operational technology with IT systems allows for a deeper, richer understanding of the manufacturing process enabling automation of quality control processes and the delivery of preventive and predictive maintenance programs.
“Modern manufacturing organisations are seeing a huge increase in data, coming at them at speed, and the need to gain a truer understanding of the manufacturing process in real-time has never been greater,” said Przemek Tomczak, SVP IoT and utilities at KX.
Tomczak welcomes the partnership with Telit’s platform, which offers data-centric IoT software and data tooling with pre-built device drivers, connectivity management tools and application connectors that enable development teams to focus on building apps, not infrastructure.
Connected factories
Ricardo Buranello, head of platforms business unit at Telit talks of powerful capabilities that can integrate connected factories and connected machines to give teams total flexibility in how data is collected, where it is sent and how their solution responds to data based on events and changing conditions throughout deployment.
“With KX and Telit, systems integrators and manufacturers can implement a full-stack streaming analytics IoT platform. Leveraging data and analytics provides the insights needed to respond quickly to either bring on additional resources or tighten process controls to increase productivity,” said Buranello.
The Industrial Analytics Market is valued at USD 13.60 billion and is expected to reach USD $36.73 billion by 2026.
With data volumes growing exponentially – Industry analyst firm IDC estimates that enterprise-related sensor data is growing at 40% per annum and will soon surpass all other data types – this joint offering answers demand from customers looking to accelerate time to deployment and value from their industrial automation strategies.
… and your eco-angle was?
It’s a sobering thought. The companies in this story presented their news and detailed their ‘world-leading ground-breaking super-innovative [insert additional hyperbole adjectives here]’ without truly extracting the emissions-related efficiency advantage that can be drawn from this type of technology proposition. Such is still the way of things in corporate IT marcoms spheres, clearly.
That time soon pass.
Although Richard ‘All my PR is about me, me, me’ Branson might be becoming a bit of a caricature of himself in his ripening years, one great insight he always delivers at his corporate speeches is the need for all enterprises to exist for something more than themselves and their bottom line i.e. he wants all firms to realise that they need to exist for a higher purpose and for the good of people.
Perhaps the next sharp edge on the ERP edge computing blade will cut through a few more ecologically sound concerns and keep you, me and even Greta happy.