How The Internet Of Things Is Already Changing Manufacturers´ Business

I’d like to share some of the IoT breakthrough models I‘ve seen in the manufacturing industry.

IoT in the aerospace and defense industry

One area in which I’ve seen new, innovative business cases is the aerospace and defense industry (A&D). Aviation engine manufacturers today aim to not just sell their aircraft, as they did for many years. They also want to offer rental programs for equipment and service at total costs per hour. The advantage for their customers is obvious: Why buy a plane if they can rent it? No huge upfront investment needed; only fixed rates that can be easily planned, and preferably a service package on top to cover the burden of maintenance.

What sounds like the perfect offering for airlines is a double-edged sword for aircraft manufacturers. Of course, rental programs provide a huge opportunity for new revenue streams. But being left with the full risk of taking care of aircraft fleet maintenance is a big challenge as well. Hence, A&D manufacturers are trying to face that issue from two angles: reducing the cost and effort of maintenance service while reducing the risk of engine failures.

Instead of maintaining airplanes on fixed schedules, Condition-based or even preventive maintenance is preferred. With sensors providing all kinds of information on the health of the asset they belong to, service managers can easily define limit ranges for deviation. In this way, they can schedule repairs and overhauls only when needed. And in an ideal case, they can even predict failures in advance and take corrective actions before a breakdown occurs.

It’s obvious that the latter has high relevance, especially for the aircraft industry. No one wants to risk an engine failure in flight. And since all modern engines today already have countless sensors built in, it would even be possible to track engine health while a plane is in the air. A service manager could track his fleet with the help of dashboards that show real-time information won from data collected from every single aircraft. Service managers would immediately be notified in case of any deviation, enabling them to identify root causes quickly and take action even if the plane is still in flight.

There’s another benefit for A&D manufacturers resulting from these use cases: the additional feedback on products tested in real-time conditions that will flow back into design and manufacturing of aircraft engines and parts. All the information collected will increase product quality and reliability and increase customer satisfaction.

IoT in the machinery and components industry

Predictive maintenance is by no means a hot topic only for A&D; it’s also very significant for asset-intensive industries such as the industry machinery & components (IM&C) industry. Motivated by the promise that predictive maintenance of assets can reduce overall maintenance costs by up to 30% and reduce breakdowns by 70%, IM&C customers are increasingly investing in this area.

Today´s challenge is that production plants are scattered all around the globe. Service staff isn’t always available, or spare parts are missing and need to be ordered while the machine is already broken down. All this is costly and painful.

So it would be helpful if physical sensors build into the respective machine could automatically and remotely send information on the asset´s health. Service managers could then track their assets via dashboards and schedule maintenance whenever an issue is predicted. This would significantly increase asset utilization and reduce costly down times.

Not only assets could be tracked remotely in this way, but entire plants could be monitored. Supervising operations, production, customer service, financial key performance indicators, and so on across the whole enterprise would allow global enterprises to set up plants in any country, anywhere in the world.

A number of companies are already working on such scenarios that would help balance shortages in resources and skills in solitary countries. Not only midsized companies would tremendously profit from the possibility of managing subsidiaries centrally from the headquarters by tracking and comparing key performance indicators.