Majority of Industrial Companies Using IoT Solutions for Internal Benefits: New Study

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To be successful, companies need to understand how and where IoT technologies and solutions will drive opportunities for operational improvements.  

A great majority of industrial companies are currently using IoT solutions for internal business benefits, according to a study released by ResearchAndMarkets.

Internal business benefits include improved operations such as optimized supply chain management.

The study also projected that Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solutions will facilitate almost $800 Billion in global economic value by 2024.

Further, it is anticipated that the future Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solutions will focus on strategic differentiation including connected products and services, greatly improving the supplier-customer relationship.

According to the study results, IIoT solutions are poised to transform many industry verticals including healthcare, retail, automotive and transport. For many industries, IIoT will significantly improve reliability, production and customer satisfaction, it said.

While, IIoT will initially improve existing processes and augmented current infrastructure, the ultimate goal will be to realize entirely new and dramatically improved products and services.

In order to be successful, the study noted that the companies should understand how and where IoT technologies and solutions will drive opportunities for operational improvements, new and enhanced products and services, as well as completely new business models.

Technologies that will drive IIoT product/service transformation

The industrial sector is rapidly integrating IIoT solutions with many technologies, such as virtual twin solutions.

The study predicted that M2M communications for IIoT will become increasingly necessary for enterprise and industrial organizations that wish to fully leverage IoT technologies.

As IIoT progresses, there will an increasingly large amount of unstructured machine data. The growing amount of machine generated industrial data will drive substantial opportunities for AI support of unstructured data analytics solutions.

One clear area of improvement for industrial businesses, as per the study findings, will be teleoperation and tele-robotics as various industries will leverage the ability to control real machines/equipment by virtual object through master controlling interfaces.

The researchers see teleoperation being transformed by digital twin technologies, which refers to the mapping of the physical world to the digital world in which IoT Platforms and Software are leveraged to create a digital representation of physical object or asset. The digital twin of a physical object can provide data about the asset such as its physical state and disposition.

Other key findings of the study include – 

  • The use of 5G for IIoT networks will be of great importance to certain industry verticals such as agriculture, logistics, and manufacturing. All of these industrial sectors will also require efficient and effective computing systems.
  • The combination of robotics, teleoperation and cloud technologies is poised to transform industrial processes across many industry verticals.
  • Traditional product companies will shift towards a service-oriented focus with IIoT supporting performance visibility
  • While core-cloud hosted solutions currently prevail, edge computing based on-premise solutions are gaining momentum
  • IIoT solutions are evolving from transparency into operations to proactive maintenance and correction.