IoT sensors, data lakes & analytics: The future of smart manufacturing intelligence

What is so revolutionary about connecting machines to the Internet? For industry, the answer is that digitised production processes will fundamentally change existing business models.

Smart manufacturing is changing production processes from beginning to end. Companies, regardless of size now compete in a global marketplace where efficiency and time to market are critical – enabled by secure, flexible and scalable manufacturing processes. Modern, smart manufacturing is nothing like the past.

Smart manufacturing takes advantage of advances in sensors and devices, communications and networking, and data storage, next gen applications, and analytics to streamline processes and workflows. It relies on an environment where information from the plant floor to the supply chain is captured in real time, made visible, and turned into actionable insights.

Traditional functions like plant operations, supply chain management, product management are brought together with new data-types, including customer sentiment from social media and placed in a company-wide data lake. The data lake consolidates unstructured data into an efficient repository that provides the enterprise full visibility into asset tracking, manufacturing operations, resources, products and key customer trends.

Industry-wide data sharing via the Data Lake enables data-in-place analytics—speeding time-to-insight and allowing new business intelligent applications not possible with independent silos of data.  For example, the Data Lake can change manufacturing process to allow customized and individualised products.  Upon ordering, the customer “tells” the factory what their product looks like, and it is automatically entered into the manufacturing process.

Data Lakes are central to smart manufacturing. By consolidating and centralising the unimaginable amounts of unstructured data, manufacturing organisations can reinvent the way they produce goods.  From custom designs to reduced costs and faster time-to-completed product, smart manufacturing techniques are already becoming a competitive requirement for organisations in this sector