IoT Boosts Quality, Safety, Productivity for Smart Manufacturing: Sumit Chowdhury, CEO, Gaia Smart Cities

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

The important problem within a company is how to reduce the entropy, by which I mean the number of various elements required such as the machines, software, vendors, etc. We are all the time exposed to a lot of technology.

Most of the CIOs are worried that there is no single platform which can stitch everything together. This means that they all have to rely on vendors for small parts of a solution. If they have outsourced their IT to one master integrator who can integrate but don’t have an internal IT team which can stitch together elements from multiple sources, then they will have a problem with the proliferation of technologies that are required today.
Technology today is for both how you interface with industrial machines and how you communicate with the devices back to the central server or an intranet or the internet. What is also important is how you analyze the data and integrate everything together for meaningful insights. So, the skills required are on the electronics side such as Electronic Communication Technology, backend data management of these devices and the data that is coming from the devices.

Finally, we have the analytics. So there are five skills required. Sometimes, companies find it difficult to understand the depth that is required.
Smart manufacturing is being looked at by people who want to improve the productivity, safety, health, etc. of industries. IoT helps you keep track at every turn: amount of material, products produced, etc. Such information in a real-time mode gives access to better turnaround. Second is the effort to completely automate manufacturing. That is where robotics comes into the picture. This involves a host of other technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT, machine vision, etc. A lot of people are working in this field and I see it growing. Robots can do the work of several people and more efficiently. There can be simple robots or complex ones. There are also those which assist human beings in carrying out jobs at a much larger scale. For example, you allow a person to lift a much higher weight. These are the kinds of things that I see happening in manufacturing.

For smart manufacturing to take place in India, we need to start with a strategy which allows multiple types of technologies to be used and integrated. CIOs need to bring in people who understand the area of smart manufacturing and can help with automation. IoT is a combination of operational technologies and information technology. And when the two meet, there are certain types of people who understand the correlation between the two. This is an important aspect. I think India is quite well poised to exploit smart manufacturing.

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