Platforms are important underpinnings on which to build, or from which to launch a rocket, a career, an ideology, but they are generally seen as passive entities. However, in the world of IoT, an IoT platform is anything but passive.

An IoT platform is something that can take the massive amounts of data generated by IoT devices and turn that data into information and insights with real business value and make these easily accessible to those who can make use of them.

Used on a production line or other industrial process an IoT platform can anticipate maintenance requirements, optimise energy usage, help streamline processes to boost output and reduce costs.

You can learn more about the potential for IoT platforms in the ifm whitepaper: Efficiency superpower. How to make better decisions on the factory floor.

In the white paper, Freddie Coertze, national IoT business manager and digital strategy leader for ifm in Australia, neatly sums up the benefits of an IoT platform, saying: “If businesses want to be ahead of the pack and ensure their product is of the highest quality, linking all their systems together through an IoT platform is the best strategy… It can provide them with the right information at the right time, helping them make the best decisions for their operation.”

Coertze will also feature at the IoT Impact conference in Sydney on June 13, on a panel session: Realising the Impact - data and technology integration, which will be sponsored by ifm.

ifm is the Australian arm of ifm efector, a German family-owned company and a global leader in sensor and automation technology.

In his role with the company, Coertze has been instrumental in applying Industry 4.0 principles across various sectors, fostering integration between production and management levels and digitally transforming core business processes.

A big factor compromising business efficiency

The whitepaper identifies some of the many challenges businesses face that prevent them from operating at maximum efficiency, and explains how the power of an IoT platform can be used to overcome these challenges.

In the whitepaper, Coertze explains how one of the biggest factors compromising business efficiency is a lack of visibility: businesses not understanding how their processes are tracking in real time. “This results in a lagging effect, which can allow issues to escalate into bigger problems before they can be rectified,” he says.

And Coertze adds that an IoT platform can, far better than any human, bring together data from multiple different systems that might interact with each other creating significant impacts on a plant’s operations but present a great challenge for a human operator to comprehend.

Key to these benefits of an IoT platform, as the whitepaper explains, are the multiple ways in which AI can enhance decision making by leveraging the huge range of data that can be gathered by the IoT platform from multiple sensors in a facility.

Example use cases

In many cases, AI can provide insights in near real time that no human analyst could gain from such huge volumes of data.

• IoT platforms can harness AI-based algorithms to optimise allocation of resources, factoring in production schedules, demand forecasts, and more.
• Machine learning algorithms can analyse images and videos of production processes to help pinpoint issues in real time, enabling operators to take immediate corrective action.
• AI-based anomaly detection algorithms can flag atypical behaviour or data patterns to help identify and correct potential problems before they escalate.
• Sensor data from equipment and machinery can be used to inform maintenance teams of potential failures before they occur, reducing the likelihood of down time.

And an IoT platform can harmonise data from disparate systems in a facility to present it in ways that give it meaning in the context of the processes being monitored, as Coertze explains.

“All factories use a range of different equipment from various places around the world, and they don’t always speak the same language or the same protocols,” he says, “An IoT platform solves that problem, because it can collect data from multiple machines and format it into a common protocol that everybody understands.”

 

The white paper also describes how an IoT platform can do more than provide information that “everybody understands”: it can interface direct to other systems so that actions it identifies as necessary are automatically initiated. For example, an indication of low stock levels of an important input to a manufacturing process could be used to automatically initiate an order for additional supply.

As Coertze says, the IoT platform is “automating a tedious manual process, and it’s also eliminating the potential for human error.”

The whitepaper summarises the main features of an IoT platform as being real-time monitoring; predictive maintenance; increased efficiency; data analytics. It also highlights a fifth, crucial feature: ease of use.

To be really effective an IoT platform must cater for a wide range of users with widely differing skills. So, the whitepaper says, a good IoT platform must offer “drag-and-drop interfaces, templates and pre-configured workflows and automated data processing … to make …[it] as friction-free for operations teams as it is for business analysts.”

This, says Coertze, will ensure the IoT platform does not tie up valuable software expertise for its day-to-day operation. “Once it’s been set up, production managers and maintenance staff can reap the efficiency benefits while software engineers are busy solving problems elsewhere in the organisation.”

Download the ifm Efficiency Superpower whitepaper. Freddie Coertze will take part in the Realising the Impact - data and technology integration panel at IoT Impact 2024, to be held at UTS Sydney 13 June. Get your ticket to IoT Impact 2024.

ifm is a sponsor of the 2024 IoT Impact conference.