Outcomes, Insights, and Best Practices from IIC Testbeds: Track & Trace Testbed
team considers bringing the newly developed standard to a standards organization to see if this is a data model applicable for general use. In the case of the data model developed for the Track and Trace Testbed, they have not approached a standards organization, to date.
The development of asset vs. backend and localization standards are being driven by the testbed. Recognizing that they will need standards to manage devices from many vendors on the factory floor, the Track and Trace Testbed team is exploring options for standardization of device management with the Object Management Group( OMG, with more than 20 years of experience developing manufacturing standards).
OUTCOMES
At the time of the interview that led to this article, the forklift use case was up and running and the plan was to present collective results to management in June 2017, a milestone culminating from sharing on-going results with management on a weekly basis. The testbed team plans to finalize the data analysis to present the full picture of the business benefits. From there, they will make decisions on how to improve testbed productivity. All of the forklifts and their data are collected and connected. The systems are in place and the data can be analyzed. But to make it really productive, it will require another step.
It took a very long time to arrive at the technology decisions and to gather the data about the fleet. The biggest delay came from the integration of technology into the physical process. When the testbed reaches the goal of bringing the implementation to a certain level – to a steady state – the team will move into a pilot implementation.
In reaching this current stage of high productivity, but not yet steady state, the first hurdle to overcome was bringing it to a customer who would allow this productive environment to be set up as a testbed. In this case, the customer was Bosch. Another hurdle was integrating new technology into equipment. This requires more than attaching sensors to the forklift. The testbed team had to arrange with the forklift producers to access the forklift data from the embedded software. The team signed the requisite agreements and asked about safety features, but by using this data, they interfered with the machine itself. And though there were many concerns about safety, which have now been addressed, the need was recognized by the team and the forklift companies that safety is an objective that must be pursued together. They now bring these different data sources together to integrate them into the Bosch IOT environment. The next stage is to bring this data together with SAP and to exchange it in a steady, stable and accurate method.
Business Value
Ultimately, the team seeks to define and achieve the anticipated business value. What is the business value to be provided by this testbed? Can somebody in the warehouse interpret these measurements and realize that this information is exactly what they need? The business value lies in the delivery of knowledge that is of interest to that person: Will these insights make an impact – and how big of an impact? Is this useful – and how useful? Much of this effort
IIC Journal of Innovation 45