How To Make The IoT Work For Your Manufacturing Clients
By Trisha Leon, contributing writer
The Internet of Things (IoT) can provide real-time visibility into an enterprise’s supply chain, especially when enabled with cloud computing ability. This is especially beneficial for manufacturers, whose supply chains span large geographical locations and depend on many suppliers, distributers, and planners. Operations taking place along the supply chain can create inefficiencies that ripple through multiple processes — logistics, warehousing, and manufacturing itself.
According to a Zebra Technologies white paper, “Zebra Accelerates Your Path To The Internet Of Things: Create A Visible Value Chain Across Your Critical Business Operations,” in order to achieve visibility across the entire business ecosystem, manufacturers need solutions that “reduce IT complexities, connect legacy devices, and are truly mission-critical ready.”
Though the IoT and its Big Data collection capabilities hold great potential for manufacturers, there are challenges businesses must address before implementing IoT solutions. First, Implementing IoT solutions is quite complex as each device uses protocols and firmware specific to it. According to Zebra Technologies, “planning, integrating, and testing the ecosystem and ensuring it is mission-critical ready is no easy task.
Connecting legacy devices to the IoT is another challenge and requires the use of intermediate-edge boxes that upgrade these devices without replacing them. Managing the many types of information sources proves difficult as well, and indicates the need for, as the white paper states, “a layer of middleware that simplifies and streamlines all this information, creates a ‘single pane of glass’ interface for all IoT devices, and securely provides it to enterprise applications.”
Most operations’ IT departments are simply not equipped to implement an IoT solution that delivers optimum data collection at top value. Therefore enterprises are looking for solutions providers that can serve their unique needs. VARs must both recognize and understand complexity of IoT devices and use this knowledge to integrate the IoT into an operation’s current business model.