It’s hard not to find an article of post about the wonders of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). We’ve written numerous times about the digital transformation and performance improvements IIoT can deliver here on the blog.
In a CHEManager International article, Putting the ROI into IIoT, Emerson’s Roel Van Doren shares how these technologies deliver business results.
In the opening question in this interview, Roel is asked about capital and operation performance analysis that Emerson has conducted. He shared:
Through close cooperation with benchmarking companies and talking to our customers, we have gathered industry-wide data on the challenges companies face in core areas like safety, reliability, production and energy/emissions. Our findings show that across the global industrial sector, annually as much as $1 trillion is lost as a result of subpar performance.
This analysis revealed that:
…many companies in the industrial sector have become stuck in decades-old work practices that fail to take advantage of available advanced digital technologies – their performance levels are suboptimal.
Some differences between Top Quartile performers and those in the other quartiles are:
Top Quartile performers had one-third the number of safety incidents compared to their average industry peers. They spent half as much on maintenance compared to average performers and had an increased production availability of 15 days per year. Top Quartile manufacturers spent 20% less on production-related expenses compared to average producers, and, last but not least, they spent one-third of the industry average on energy costs and had 30% less CO2 emissions.
Roel described Emerson’s Operational Certainty initiative:
… a technology and engineering-based program designed to help recover that $1 trillion in operational losses.
A critical part of Operational Certainty is the use of new peer benchmarking insights to bring a better perspective on best practices and technologies to achieve Top Quartile performance in the areas of safety, reliability, production and energy management.
The path to Top Quartile performance starts with an Operational Certainty workshop. These sessions help to pinpoint the root causes of poor performance, prioritize actions that can yield the greatest improvement and establish a scalable work plan for achieving those results.
The role of IIoT?
Distributing data and information seamlessly via the internet makes IIoT the new frontier of manufacturing – it has even been referred to as a phenomenon that will reinvent manufacturing. Clearly IIoT is an important part of the fourth industrial revolution we find ourselves in. IIoT is pivotal to Operational Certainty because we can leverage the benefits of IIoT to help companies improve their operational performance.
IIoT enables:
…to either empower your company’s experts with the additional information they need for decisions and action that can facilitate operational performance improvements, or for the first time to completely outsource that analysis and decision making to third party domain experts. There are four critical aspects to achieving this: the provision of rich, real-time operating data from intelligent sensing and automation technologies across the business; secure transport of that data to where it’s needed anywhere in the world; robust, scalable software to convert the data into actionable insights; and domain expertise to make the decisions and drive the outcomes that will lead to improved performance. A new business model called Connected Services has also emerged where those last two pieces are performed by a remote third party rather than in-house experts.
Read the article for Roel’s full insights and how your company might get started in a digital transformation to improved performance.
You can connect and interact with other IIoT experts in the Improve & Modernize and Wireless groups in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.
