How real-time predictive insight and automated decision-making will take over your business

When the Internet of Things (IoT) comes to life in your food plant you won’t have to make so many decisions. Data from the connected devices, sensors and chips around the plant and in your equipment and products will produce real-time predictive insights and allow automated decision-making.

Sounds simple and like a wonderful way to optimise your production doesn’t it? But as always nothing is ever quite that simple. The whole system will depend on your organisation’s ability to collect, analyse and utilise the data produced by the devices. And there will be a lot of data, a very big amount of data, all right, a huge amount of data.

Many companies will define their early experiences with the Internet of Things by the value they create through their new data-driven insights. To achieve success, they will look to cloud services to compose these new capabilities in an agile manner and pay for them as they are consumed. They will deploy applications that engage with the Internet of Things to an increasingly mobile workforce and they will need to underpin their new IoT-ready enterprise with robust security capabilities.

Optimising the performance and maintenance of individual systems is the first, and most obvious, application for the IoT. Much of this can be achieved today and indeed many companies have been successful in this area for some time. Car manufacturers, for example, have used onboard diagnostics and telemetry to optimise maintenance schedules and create fixed-price maintenance offerings. They’ve used predictive analytics in their factories to predict and reduce failures and to minimise the number of warranty recalls. But to achieve the real promise of IoT, the individual systems need to be connected, communicate with each other and make decisions for themselves, in a decentralised fashion.

As an example of the IoT at work, the concept of the connected car is an easy one to grasp. Imagine the car you’re driving can sense that it is stuck in traffic. Without bothering you, the driver, it communicates with other cars in the area and discovers that a parallel route is less congested. It reworks its current GPS route settings and you manoeuvre the vehicle to take advantage of the new insight. Here the ‘things’ are communicating with each other, collaborating and enabling decentralised decisions to be made by each other, not by some central controller (in this case, you — the driver).

In this example, we have created a process of congestion aware routing, and it is this pattern of new process capabilities, where one entity can be aware of others, that is the true power of the IoT. If we instrument a miner’s safety vest with sensors and allow it to communicate with our mining equipment, we can easily create safety-aware equipment operations, just as we can create more complex capabilities such as maintenance schedule-aware production or environment (weather)-aware production planning. When we create these new process capabilities across an entire organisation’s supply chain, we are building the IoT-enabled enterprise of the future.

Today, IoT systems are being extended to incorporate asset management systems and use predictive analytics to optimise maintenance. Other applications are focused on predicting and optimising production, productivity, energy utilisation, planning and scheduling. Indeed, we are seeing myriad potential applications for the IoT from waste management to urban planning, environmental sensing, sustainable urban environments, continuous care, emergency response, social interaction gadgets, intelligent shopping, event management, predictive maintenance — and many others we have not yet imagined.

Intelligent IoT systems will also help speed the development of new products, support dynamic response to product demands and provide real-time optimisation of manufacturing production and supply chain networks through interconnectivity of machinery, sensors and control systems.

And as the line between smartphones and mobile devices blurs, and linkage to IoT systems continues to expand, products and services which once might have been labelled science fiction are fast becoming a reality.

To find out more about the IoT come to ACI Connect* and listen to Ross Collins’ keynote address: Global Subject Matter Expert — Predictive & Optimization Solutions.

Collins is a subject matter expert in IBM’s Predictive and Optimization Solutions Center of Excellence. He has a global role, focused on bringing the best of IBM’s analytical solutions to clients in the natural resources industries. He has over 30 years of IT experience and in previous roles has been IBM’s chief technical officer for Chemicals & Petroleum and a partner in IBM’s Global Business Services. He has worked with IBM’s clients in mining, oil and gas, energy distribution and telecommunications, developing a practical knowledge of predictive asset optimisation and the Internet of Things.

*ACI Connect is Australia’s only conference and exhibition dedicated to automation, control and instrumentation technology developments. It has the backing and support of leading industry bodies IICA and Engineers Australia. The event launched in Melbourne last year and the 2015 event will take place 12-13 August at Sydney Olympic Park.