Industrial Automation Magazine India

A System Integrator plays a key role in building the IIoT solution

Published on : Friday 08-10-2021

Navveen Balani, AI, Blockchain & IoT Leader and Google Cloud Certified Fellow

Today, most industry stakeholders are aware of the many benefits of IIoT, yet are wary of joining the revolution. What could be the reasons?
We are moving towards a smart, data-driven and connected future, but in order to realise the vision for consumer as well as industrial IoT, we need to get past the initial hurdles. These initial hurdles in the context of IIoT is quite substantial as it is a complex integration journey involving multiple parties, requirement on skills and expertise on variety of technologies, lack of standards, lack of effective IIoT data strategy, perception on high total cost of ownership as compared to RoI, along with existing brownfield plants that needs to be transformed.
 
What are the challenges manufacturers face in adopting IIoT solutions?
As mentioned earlier, IIoT is an incremental and complex integration journey involving multiple parties – Manufacturer, Network Providers, Cloud/Platform providers, Specialised IoT Startups, System Integrations and Strategy/Consulting to realise end-to-end IIoT solution.
 
The first challenge is around finding the right set of partners, skills and expertise and to develop the ecosystem.
 
The second and most important challenge is around building an effective IIoT data strategy. The real value of IIoT is about deriving actionable business insight and data is the key to deliver that value. I have talked about this in detail as part of the skill strategy.
 
Some of the other challenges are defining an effective incremental roadmap and the business value being delivered at each stage, expertise around end-to-end integration, lack of standardisation, brownfield plants modernisation – how to augment the existing manufacturing infrastructure with right sensor/tools and setup secured network connectivity, setting up scalable cloud infrastructure and edge gateway and finally having domain specific data/ML experts which can build precise models to realise the business outcomes.
 
Is the manufacturing sector, especially the SMEs, constrained by the paucity of system integrators?
A System Integrator plays a key role in building the IIoT solution by providing end-to-end integration, hardware connectivity, standards interoperability, simulation and testing, network operability and identifying bottlenecks, picking the right cloud services and overall security, scalability and performance of the IIoT solution. As I mentioned earlier, finding the right set of ecosystem partners is very essential for realising the IIoT solution. Also depending on the industry/domain, one might need an expert system integrator, specialised on the required domain, who can use their existing expertise to capture the right IIoT data for integration. Finding the right system integrator, coupled with the cost of implementation can be a key constraint, especially for an SME.
 
Experts believe lack of skills is one of the main reasons for low adoption. How true is this?
Realising the true value of IIoT requires a combinatorial power of multiple technologies – IoT, AI, Cloud, Edge Gateway, Digital, Networking, along with platforms and capabilities that enable building secure, scalable and connected end to end IIoT solutions. 
 
For a SME, getting these diverse skill sets would be quite challenging. But, with proper planning and execution, this can be realised incrementally. For instance, rather than having all skills onboard, the first priority that needs to be worked on is building an effective IIoT data strategy – what kind of data is available, what data is needed, how to capture the data from sensors at what intervals, do you need new sensors and new networking/connectivity options and what insights you want to get out of the data like condition based maintenance, predictive maintenance, shop floor optimisation, worker safety, setup digital twins or using the connected data to gain visibility and use it with other solutions for new business opportunity. 
 
Once the IIoT data strategy is properly defined and implemented, the next phase of details and implementation can start.
 
In the Indian context, IIoT should actually resonate more with the solutions for brownfield plants, yet the response is slow.
Brownfield plants usually have some kind of instrumentation already built-in, so you first need to track the existing wear and tear and discover the remaining service life of the equipment. So, apart from adding sensors and connectivity, we would need to digitise the existing inventory with required serviceability data. 
 
Connectivity also needs to be addressed for legacy equipment on how to transfer the operation data via smart sensors and using technologies like LWAN. Brownfield plants transformation, now also need to look at the security holistically and how data is being transferred in and out of the shop floor. 
 
The challenges that we talked about earlier for any IIoT implementation, coupled with existing transformation requirements, could be one of the key barriers for slow adoption. 
 
How can the manufacturing sector overcome these hurdles and arrive at a holistic approach?
The approach is to take incremental steps and pick up a use case for realisation, describing what problem is being solved and what would be the business value. The first phase of any use case is to understand what data is available and what needs to be captured and streamlined.
 
Ideally any manufacturing IoT realisation can be broken down into the following five phases:
a. Monitoring & utilisation
b. Condition based maintenance
c. Predictive maintenance
d. Optimisation, and
e. Connecting ‘connected solutions.’
 
I leave you with one of my approaches (see link for reference) on realising the IIoT roadmap by taking a real world example – https://cloudsolutions.academy/how-to/application-of-iot-in-manufacturing/
 
Navveen Balani is Google Cloud Certified Fellow, having 21+ years of experience in building enterprise products using exponential technology, specialising in Cloud, AI, Blockchain and IoT. He has worked with customers across the globe, to build strategy and solutions for their digital transformation journey.
 
He is author of Award winning book on IoT, titled “Enterprise IoT” and you can find him talking about latest technology trends on his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/CloudSolutionsAcademy. His book is used as reference by many enterprises and startups for building their IoT strategy and solutions. You can connect with him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/naveenbalani/