Imagine
connecting your car, home systems and appliances to your devices in such a way that
you could do some amazing things with the information you collect.
Such “smart”
devices are nothing new, but these units are about to get a lot smarter, thanks
to an innovation known as the Internet of Things
(IoT).
IoT delivers accurate
data in real time so that you can act on it to gain a desired outcome when it
is most needed. For example, there are devices that monitor your eating,
sleeping and exercising habits and suggest how to improve each based on the
data it collects and analyzes from your daily schedule. Another device can be
programmed to notify relatives if your car is involved in an accident.
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| IoT Connects people to things via the Internet |
An appliance maker is even experimenting with
a way for you to observe
a roast as it is cooking in your oven when you’re not at home, so that you
can remotely fine tune temperature and time.
This era of
“Big Data” is also changing the face of manufacturing. New improvements in
software and data storage make it possible to timely collect and analyze
enormous quantities of data. Companies can accurately predict when a part for a
certain machine needs to be replaced before it fails based on an analysis of long
term historical data.
As a recent Industry
Week article notes, IoT has the capability of tracking every aspect of a
business from the all the machines on a factory floor to inventory and suppliers:
“When fully leveraged,” the article notes,
“ IoT can mean better inventory management, pulled production instead of pushed
production, accurate activity-based costing, automatic adjusted logistics that
adapt to changes in the manufacturing layer and productivity increases.”
A GE white paper on the
topic notes the impact of IoT implementation:
“We can be collectively objective, rather than
individually subjective. We can do so in areas where we formerly acted based on
intuition and assumption rather than by data and analysis.”
If this seems
like another passing fad to you, consider GE and its commitment
to IoT. CEO Jeffrey Immelt made a bold investment in recent years to
position GE as the leading software provider for the Industrial Internet. The
company set up a software operation in San Ramon, California, in 2012 and developed
its own operating system for the Industrial Internet called, “Predix.”
Job seekers
initially found it difficult to take GE’s ads for software developers seriously
(think of the GE TV ad where a coder named Owen tells his skeptical friends he
has been hired by GE to write “…a new language for machines so planes, trains
and even hospitals can work better”).
Soon they got
the message and GE’s services have helped manufacturing companies improve
operations. For example, GE’s aviation customers are using Predix applications
to monitor wear and tear on their jet engines and fine tune maintenance
schedules. It’s also giving wind turbines the capability of automatically changing
the direction of their blades to catch more wind.
GE’s ultimate
goal is to become a top 10 software company by 2020 by helping manufacturing
companies utilize advanced data collection and analyses afforded by IoT and the
connectivity of the internet.
And that
ultimately means better, more reliable products for all of us.
Joe Cappello is Director of Global
Marketing for Rotor Clip Company.
