Global IoT company ifm will take part in a session titled ‘Adapting to Survive’ at IoT Impact 2023 — a one day conference on IoT produced by the IoT Alliance Australia (IoTAA) and IoT Hub to be held in Sydney on 23 May.

The session will look at how the need for resilience and innovation is driving manufacturers, and unlocking the potential of IoT in manufacturing.

The session title could well apply to ifm, which was founded in Germany 50 years ago. Not only has it survived, it has prospered, with operations in 71 countries, including Australia, while remaining family owned.

ifm has been in Australia for 25 years and today has around 68 full time employees and six facilities across the country, in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Launceston, Sydney and Brisbane.

Its headquarters are in Melbourne and all locations provide sales, technical support and services, in line with ifm’s mantra of being ‘close to you.’ This means the company does not rely on partners but deals direct with customers in all the 71 countries in which it operates. It says this approach enables it to understand what problems customers are trying to solve and provide the right solutions.

‘Close to you’ in Australia means being close to a very wide range of companies by both function and size. ifm has customers ranging from the largest mining companies to SMEs, all served directly.

ifm’s vision is to “provide products and solutions to enable our customers to translate their data into actionable insights that protect, enhance, and add value to their business.”

At IoT Impact 2023 ifm will showcase its IoT platform, Moneo, an AI-assisted predictive maintenance tool that can be integrated into existing systems. The company will demonstrate several use cases showing how, as a self-service platform, Moneo can provide valuable insights and control over a factory's operations, helping to optimise performance, reduce costs and increase productivity.

A key feature of Moneo is to provide asset and machine health to predict failures in advance. ifm says users do not need any IT or data analytics expertise to make use of Moneo.

ifm sees Moneo as addressing what it believes will be a key trend in coming years: the increasing use of self-service middleware to collect data from multiple sources into a platform from which an entire business can gain actionable insights. It believes making this functionality self-service and almost plug-and-play will enable companies to reap the true benefits of the qualified data an IIoT platform can provide.

“In the past, businesses have relied on data science experts to analyse equipment data and provide insights,” ifm says. “Now, they can access these insights quickly and cost-effectively through the power of artificial intelligence, and they can set this up themselves with an easy, self-service tool Moneo.”

Much of this data comes from sensors of which ifm is a major manufacturer and it is also focussing on developing smarter sensors to deliver better and more data to IoT platforms, again to enhance business outcomes.