It seems to me that most of the manufacturers I talk to are drowning in data, and yet they are struggling to make it useful. A modern industrial facility can easily produce one terabyte of data each day. With a wave of new technologies for artificial intelligence and machine learning—on top of real-time dashboards and augmented reality—we should see huge gains in productivity. Unplanned maintenance of assets and production lines should be a thing of the past.
Most people are familiar with Industrie 4.0, Smart Manufacturing, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). These terms are used to describe the tremendous changes in operations technology brought on by a surge in underlying technologies including cloud, big data, smart sensors, single board solid state computers, wireless networks, analytics, application development platforms, and mobile devices.
