Industrial IoT by MarketScale

On this episode of the Industrial IoT Podcast, Adam Livesay, co-founder, and CEO at Elevāt.IoT, joined host Geoffrey Short to discuss how businesses and industries are blending this technology into their machines and getting value out of it. Elevāt.IoT specializes in connecting fleets of machines and enabling the flow of data between operators, distributors, and OEMs since 2015.

How can business owners and decision-makers use this technology to better improve their workflows? Livesay said businesses first need a strategy on what problem they are trying to solve. Once they know that, they need to put an IoT team into place.

Livesay said businesses are recognizing the ROI from IoT. There’s an evolution of comprehension since 2015 around what IoT can accomplish and the ROI it can bring to a business.

“Deployment,” Livesay said, “has gone down from 18 months for a successful production deployment, to less than six months.”

Short asked Livesay how Elevāt.IoT has utilized this technology. Livesay provided an example of working with nut companies to put IoT on their tree shakers to generate significant process improvement data never before available to them.

Livesay sees a great opportunity in collaboration of information share throughout the whole ecosystem of industrial machines as the evolution of IoT. With the costs of deploying IoT going down tremendously over the past few years, now is a great time for businesses to explore their IoT strategy.

The business world relies on data; there's no escaping it, and there shouldn't be a desire to. Sophisticated data analysis is making business more efficient across the board. On this episode of the MarketScale Industrial IoT Podcast, Lane Leach, Senior Systems Engineer for Pinnacle Business Systems, sat down with host Sean Heath and they discussed the complex challenge of backing up a company’s critical systems.

The most reliable way to recover from a catastrophic data corruption event is to restore the necessary systems from their backups. As Leach points out, for many companies, those backups simply were not created, whether through oversight or lack of priority.

“It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of having that be unavailable to be a quick reminder of how important it really is," he said.

The stark impact of not having a comprehensive backup plan is clearly reinforced during a crisis, according to Leach.

“It could cripple your business to the point where you may have to go out of business,” he said.

Leach explained that not all dangers are unforeseen. He described a situation occurring in California to illustrate the need to prepare for expected issues, as well.

“Because of fires, you have the major electrical utility provider making a proactive decision, in their case, to have power outages. Well, imagine your business being in one of those impacted and affected counties and not having power for several days,” he said. “Where is your data? Is that something your business can withstand?”

The majority of businesses focus on the wrong side of the data backup equation, offered Leach.

“If we approach high availability and business continuity from a perspective of the data, and not the equipment, let’s start there,” he suggested. “The place to start is: what can I live without?”

Manufacturing companies can often be slow to adopt new technology. It’s not because they have doubts about the potential; it’s typically because of the disruption of implementation. This especially true when it comes to finishing systems. Manufacturers may feel literally “chained” to the traditional chain systems. Today, we’re joined by John Claman, Sales Rep and Marketing Supervisor of IntelliFinishing to talk about what opportunities manufacturers have with alternatives to chain systems.

John said, “At some point, manufacturers will begin to see the need to upgrade their finishing systems for better quality and better throughput. This creates the need for automation and new technology. But it doesn’t come without challenges.”

The monorail system for parts finishing goes back to the days of Henry Ford and is still used in many settings. The problem with these chain conveyors is that they are very limited. They only go in one direction and at a certain speed. There’s really no way to customize, leaving manufacturers often unable to innovate.

John shared, “With a monorail system, you are locked into one speed. So, let’s say a new paint becomes available that has a shorter cure time. It would be hard for a business to use the new paint because they don’t have any control over timing.”

IntelliFinishing has rewritten the book on manufacturing painting systems with their friction tube system. It doesn’t use chains but rather has aluminum tubes connected to trolleys. It offers much more flexibility. “No chains mean you can scale and change the conveyor system based on your needs. And one of the greatest benefits of the system are that it can greatly reduce energy costs associated with idle equipment and heat loss,” John said

The difference in the friction tube system is that it can move forward and backward as well as have adjustable timers. Further, the way that ovens are used for curing is improved because the whole system doesn’t go in the oven, just the product. “We recently assessed a system for a customer and found that our system could reduce heat loss by 18%,” John commented.

Find out more about the IntelliFinishing system and how it’s changing manufacturing painting processes by listening to the podcast.

Computerized maintenance management software is arguably one of the important purchases you'll make in manufacturing, but as our guest today on the podcast can tell you, it's a complicated process. In this new episode, host Sean Heath sat down with Steve Reed, Vice President of Safety and Engineering at Kasa, for answers to all your CMMS questions.

So, how do you know you're using all the functions efficiently, if at all, and what do you do when it comes to integrating that CMMS with your control system? Those are issues that companies often face when implementing new software or technology, Steve said.

"Like a lot of software packages, people get accustomed to using certain features within them but there are other capabilities within those tools that they don't necessarily use," he said, explaining that initial training at installation doesn't necessarily mean your team is using all possible functions correctly.

He suggests going back through the features with the manufacturer every few years to ensure all features are being utilized and new team members are receiving firsthand training.

Also in this episode, Steve discussed how industrial IoT can aid predictive maintenance scheduling in a meaningful way.

"If you do your predictive maintenance accurately and reliably by integrating the control system into your CMM, you can easily predict these imminent failures well in advance," Steve said. "You can manage that in a smart way before it's an emergency."

The Internet of Things has allowed people to be more efficient in their routines for years, and businesses are increasingly implementing the technology into their own. Industrial conglomerate Honeywell announced it is adding more automation, cybersecurity and visualization tools to its ‘Forge for Buildings’ IoT platform.

Honeywell CEO Darius Adamczyk told CNBC the company is also investing in robotics, amongst other smart tech.

Another American institution, Kentucky Fried Chicken, is also implementing the latest innovations in its field. At least for now.

The company began testing plant-based chicken yesterday through a partnership with Beyond Meat. The meatless nuggets and wings are available at just one KFC location in Atlanta right now, but if tests go well, the new menu item could be at a location near you soon.

Yahoo Finance reports that the product contains about 20 ingredients, with its core component being a pea protein.

Tune in to Business Casual, MarketScale’s live radio broadcast, every Wednesday and Friday at 8 a.m. CST.

The world of IoT has been evolving industries for several years now; from manufacturing to retail, data is giving businesses unparalleled decision making capabilities. But are businesses really leveraging IoT to its full potential?

To dive deep into the subject, we were joined by Atul Patel, CEO & co-founder of Edyza Inc., an enabler of IoT for high-density connectivity and computing, and John Lam, vice president of sales for Premio Inc., a designer, and builder of computing technologies, including embedded systems.

Patel began his journey with IoT with home automation. In 2012, this was a very novel market but something he wanted to explore. But there were challenges.

“There were lots of bugs and issues with interoperability. I learned what it was like from the consumer standpoint and knew there had to be a better approach when applying IoT to Industry 4.0,” Patel said.

The problem with applying it to Industry 4.0 is there are different types of connectivity and specific use cases force business to pick a path.

“Our clients need microanalysis of every five square feet of an area and so many things to track and individual sensors. There is a breadth of different options to connect. We think that integration will happen more at the cloud and Edge. We can make this happen with the powerful Premio devices," Patel said.

To truly maximize IoT devices, Patel & Lam argue you need more sensors, potentially hundreds per task. To the uninformed, it may seem excessive or unimaginable to run a stable network of that many nodes and that much data.

When that infrastructure is there, though, the data captured is hard to fathom. “If you had a factory where temperature was critical, and you only had one thermostat, I would challenge you to have hundreds. If the cost and implementation were minimal, wouldn’t you want a full-scale view? It opens up the opportunity to collect data and becomes a necessity. They were making decisions on just a few touchpoints; now they have much more information," Patel said.

Edyza doesn't achieve this alone; a powerful digital infrastructure means reliable hardware. Premio works with companies like Edyza and other Industry 4.0 change-makers to provide the back-end to the back-end. “There is much diversity in sensors. The goal is to have big data collection from the sensors. From the Premio perspective, we are the engine to collect the data, creating predictability and the ability to make better decisions for companies," Lam said.

Communications have fundamentally changed since the implementation of broadband services; today, customer expectations are that communication is instant and clear.

"Internet is now the key to this business because everything flows through it. Whether it's the phone or video or internet," Chris Boring, vice president of sales and marketing at Promptlink Communications, said.

This standard for speed has made broadband companies more all-encompassing but also forced them to provide new offerings to customers to stay competitive.

"What it's changed is, from an operator's standpoint, it has completely changed their business model because as they've gone from what in 1995 we were, which was a pure video solution, to an internet provider and phone provider," Boring said. "Without these innovations for the cable side of the business in DOCSIS, this never could happen. It's completely transformed how people access content in their homes and how operators have to design their networks and their day-to-day activities."

Boring has been involved in broadband for close to 25 years and spoke to MarketScale about the effect of technology-led change to broadband business, some of the standard issues he has experienced over the years and how he would guide the industry to improve it.

There has been plenty of buzz around the possibilities that 5G will bring to society. Steadily, new markets around the United States have tested the next generation of cellular network technology, but there is far more to come than faster cell phone service.

PC Mag Lead Analyst Sascha Segan has traveled the country testing the strength and reliability of telecom giants’ 5G networks, most recently Sprint’s in Dallas.

Segan said several industries will operate differently due to the speed 5G brings to business technologies.

“There are a couple of different aspects of 5G which can sometimes get lost in some of the hype, and the most obvious one is greater speed, greater bandwidth,” Segan said. “You can talk about that as enabling a lot of remote presence capabilities, for instance a lot more remote-presence robots in offices and warehouses, remote medicine and surgery, long distance remote education, all enabled through faster, better-guaranteed bandwidth.”

While the broad impact of 5G might not be felt nationwide until 2021 or 2022, certain regions of the U.S. are already seeing what the future might bring, and businesses are preemptively planning for what their industry might look like in a few short years.

Want to learn more about 5G? Check out this podcast to find out what 5G and security have in common with dragons.

We're in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, the next wave of innovation in manufacturing. Much of it is tied to technology, allowing for increased automation and, as a result, higher efficiency. One area of manufacturing that is being helped by these increased efficiency, creating positive ripple effects for the entire industry, is inspection. To elaborate on this new world for industrial quality control, we welcomed Laxman Rajagopalan, head of marketing at DWFritz, as well as Dustin Seetoo, Director of Product Marketing at Premio, Inc., a partner of DWFritz's.

DWFritz Precision Automation focuses on inspection automation in manufacturing. What exactly does this mean? Rajagopalan described it as: “When a part is coming down the line, what we focus on is inspecting it completely to ensure quality. We use non-contact metrology measurement called ZeroTouch to enable 100% inspection rapidly and in real-time."

This is crucial to an industry that relies so heavily on avoiding defective production but that hedged their bets on a quality control process that didn't check every piece coming down the conveyer belt.

"It’s the next step in quality control because in most cases manufacturers simply inspect a sample of their product, which means defective products could have made it down the line," Rajagopalan said. “Ultimately, we’re about helping companies achieve efficiency as well as increase throughput and ROI.”

Premio has been partnering with DWFritz to further the initiatives of Industry 4.0 and create the back-end necessary to power this non-contact metrology. Premio designs and build world-class computing technologies such as enterprise servers, embedded systems, and touch panel solutions.

“It’s an important time in the industry. Digital transformation is here, and industrial automation is part of it. What we’ve seen is that many facilities have legacy systems, but they now have lots of devices that have the ability to record and process data, so new infrastructures are necessary," Seetoo said. "That data, available in real-time, is critical for a company to analyze and prevent issues. The more that devices become connected, the more valuable the data.”

In manufacturing, there are many different players, all of which can benefit from receiving better inspection. Rajagopalan turned to medical device manufacturers as an example.

“Because of the nature of that industry and regulations, everything has to be 100% inspected. Legacy systems and manual inspections aren’t efficient and had caused devices with defects to make it to patients," he said. "With ZeroTouch, they can measure every intricate part. It captures millions of data points in seconds."

The power of a Variable Frequency Drive, or VFD, cannot be understated in all industries that thrive off of efficient manufacturing. To recap, a VFD adjusts the frequency or voltage of power by variating the frequency of what’s driving the power, i.e., the motor. This is helpful for a couple of reasons: it allows companies to run three-phase power from a single phase power supply, and it allows equipment to run at a voltage or frequency other than what a power company provides, or what’s available in a certain location.

The ability to change speed creates new possibilities in process improvement, and on today's podcast, Mike Darrol, communications engineer and embedded application development professional at Advanced Industrial Devices, joins us to break down just how those process improvements can bring value to a manufacturing company.

At a basic level, a VFD can save money and time. It reduces the wear-and-tear on machinery by allowing equipment to warm up slowly and then adjust its speed as needed. It reduces the need for replacing costly parts like clutches and gearboxes, and even eliminates water hammering as well as wear on piping and check valves. Overall, companies find that the amount that they save on mechanical and electrical payouts can often pay for a new piece of equipment within 18 months, giving them more capital to focus on other areas within the business.

Give this podcast with Darrol a listen to hear how AID USA is aiming to make complicated applications simpler with industry-tailored, turnkey VFD products to improve manufacturing processes.