Industrial Internet of Things – Digitizing Today’s Factories

Delivering analytics solutions for IIoT Industry. Track sensor data with Thinklayer IIoT Suite.

The first industrial revolution started in the 18^th Century with steam technology and labor-intensive production. Slowly it progressed towards an electricity-powered assembly line production in the 19^th century. Towards the end of the 20^th century, electronics and IT digitized the industries. Today we are witnessing a wave of technological revolution where big data, artificial intelligence, and augmented/virtual reality are modernizing the existing factories to become smart factories. This is termed IIOT or Industry 4.0.

The architecture of most of the factories operational today have no connection between the Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT). Therefore, OT devices like PLCs, SCADAs, CNCs which are involved in the production of goods are not involved in the data collection from shop floor.

Today, numerous technology companies have come up with software drivers that can interact with shop floor devices for data collection and publishing of the same to ERPs. The same data can be sent to dashboards and analytics engines for machine learning to get interesting production insights. This method of automated data collection is enabling manufacturing teams understand their Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and to take actions when there are problems like downtimes, rejections or low speed of production.

Thinklayer focusses on end to end digitization of existing factories. Our very own dashboarding tool ‘Thinklytics’ helps in visualizing real time shop floor data through interactive dashboards. Because of this the factory production team is always ready for any possible setbacks in production. Our solution helps companies to also send data from PLCs, CNCs, SCADAs, RFIDS and others to all types of ERPs, enabling OT-IT convergence. Any legacy factory can also be converted to a smart one. Our consulting team will do a process study to understand the production system and will then come up with a plan to make it a smart one. We will work on networking, data collection, data dashboarding and installation of appropriate sensors at suitable points of production for conversion to smart factory.