Industrial applications: What does a successful deployment look like?

I recently took part in a plant tour with a manufacturer in the early days of modernizing its plant floor. Two decades old, this factory had always relied on manual data collection. The team hand-carried operational data back to the office to be correlated and analyzed. Then they would make improvements or address issues they found during the evaluation.

It remained a long, tedious process and a task the operations and IT teams performed begrudgingly on top of their day-to-day responsibilities.

In the last year, however, the operations technology (OT) and IT teams have collaborated to improve these processes, by:

Upgrading the network to support better plant-wide communications

Installing Wi-Fi access points to collect data using handheld scanners

Upgrading their new manufacturing cells so they can integrate their manufacturing execution system (MES) to access data directly from the plant floor.

The overall goal of these solution investments is to improve production and yield. By centering on focused and achievable outcomes, this manufacturer is well on its way to building a platform to better support applications and infrastructure. In turn, that platform will make the company more efficient and improve its bottom line.

Real world deployments for industrial applications

This case study is just one example of an effective real-world deployment, but there are countless stories everywhere about why why industrial IoT projects fail.

To explore this topic further, my colleague Scot Wlodarczak and I recently conducted a webinar on Real World Deployments for Industrial Applications. The webinar is now available on demand as part of our Factory of the Future webinar series. During the session, we explored actual case studies around infrastructure, analytics, and visibility that are driving true economic value across manufacturing organizations.

The SlideShare below is a preview of the content you’ll see in the webcast.

https://www.slideshare.net/Cisco/real-world-deployments-for-industrial-applications

View the on-demand recording for “Real World Deployments for Industrial Applications” here. Thanks to everyone who registered for these sessions. If you’re interested in attending more webinars in the series, please register here. And if you have any suggestions on further topics, please let me know in the comments below.