Manufacturing – Opportunities for Innovation
4. USE CASES The following use cases capture how these IIoT application themes relate to any IIoT disruption. 4.1 Controlled Ambiance as a Service
Industrial manufacturers are transforming their business models from product-centric to outcome-centric in order to gain competitive advantage. This shift to a more mature level enables customers to pay for only the value and nothing else.“ Controlled ambience as a service” is one such example for industrial environment HVAC needs. Ambience-regulating vendors will have visibility into physical atmosphere needs of the workplace along with past consumption levels and associated risk events. This business model could be highly relevant to environment-sensitive workplaces such as underground mining, drug research and development and oil refineries. For instance, in the underground mining workplace, ensuring ambience parameters in the control range is of utmost importance. A slight change in properties such as coal dust ratio( combustible environment), Oxygen / Nitrogen / CO concentration( worker safety), etc. could create severe, damaging outcomes. A deviating dataset received by an automated control system would respond by spraying rock dust or activating ventilation fans respectively, to re-attain the safe, prescribed limits. These data points( historical as well as real time) backed by deep analytics, will empower the vendor to“ intelligently” own the accountability to keep the system up and running. This ensures enterprise ambience is maintained in accordance with predefine levels. This will enable the organization to satisfy the core need: a controlled and safe workplace. On the other hand, enterprises will be freed from owning the physical hardware which was never their core competency, empowering them to pay only for the outcome.
4.2 Proactive Quality Assurance
In a typical industrial scenario today, the quality approach followed is reactive rather than proactive. This often leads to rework and a high level of rejections, increasing costs and hampering productivity.
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