The problems described above are tackled by companies from various industries, from 3D printing to electronics, but also from various angles in their attempt to improve various portions of the value chain. However, this siloed innovation…
Today, the term Digital Twin is ubiquitous. Four years ago, I had my first personal contact with this concept. I attended the VDI conference “Big Data in Manufacturing”, where a General Electric's (GE) manager presented the…
The movement towards Industrie 4.0 leads to a higher software penetration on the shop floor. Companies must sit behind the steering wheel if they do not want to run into trouble. A suitable software architecture is…
The economy has always had a pivotal role inside societies that have evolved over centuries. In recent decades, we witnessed several industrial revolutions that have shaped our civilization [1]. One of the best examples of the…
IIoT has often been presented as a cost-saving mechanism or a means to make factories more productive. It is all that, of course. But the benefits of IoT don’t end there since they allow for the…
In the past, if you wanted to know how a machine was performing on a shop floor, you would have had to put pencil to paper and note the output, the error rate, the quality, all…
For manufacturers, managing the supply chain from beginning to end has been like traveling two superhighways interrupted by a long stretch of dirt road. Manufacturers have benefited from increasingly powerful tools for demand planning and logistics…
Edge computing has many beenefits; it means faster response times, increased reliability and security. A lot has been said about how the Internet of Things ( IoT ) is revolutionizing the manufacturing world. Many studies have…
The convergence of Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) systems may help manufacturers embrace new service offerings using web-based business models. Many years ago one of my distributor partners took me to do an automation…
Two lawyers walk into a smart manufacturing conference. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, right? Well, no, actually, it was the reality last month when lawyers Matt Pollins, partner and head of commercial/TMT at…
In this fifth and final part of our five-part Augmented Reality for Transportation and Logistics series, we’ll look at the kinds of interaction technologies that can help make an AR implementation successful. We'll also explore the…
With Industry 4.0, the manufacturing world is embracing the very significant efficiencies and cost benefits to be gained through sensing, collecting and analysing data through many disparate sensors out in the field. The advantages are clear:…