What is the Industrial Internet of Things?

Jared Beach, IT Analyst for Manufacturing Operations, introduces the Internet of Things (IoT), differentiates the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and explains what all the above means for the future of manufacturing. To learn more, contact us at info@indx.com.

Full Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Jared Beach and I'm an IT Analyst at the Chicago office. What is Internet of Things? Internet of Things, or IoT, refers to all of the devices which are connected and communicating with one another via the internet. An example of Internet of Things in our everyday lives would be smart home devices, like lights, that are connected to your WiFi. Since you can turn it off and on from your phone, it gives you a new way to control something in your home that you wouldn't have without the internet or networks.

Although we think about Internet of Things in terms of these devices that we see every day, like smart home devices, it also applies to a much wider range of technologies, like in the field of manufacturing and industry. We are concerned with IIoT instead of IoT, meaning the Industrial Internet of Things. The Industrial Internet of Things is all of the same principles, except applying them to manufacturing and industry. For example, all of the equipment, POCs, sensors, machinery on a plant floor are connected on a factory network, which kind of puts them into an Industrial Internet of Things. This way, we can command them more efficiently. We can collect data on them more efficiently. We can have them communicate with one another. For example, if there's two machinery that need to interact with each other, they can send parameters to each other to let them know if it's okay for them to perform actions at that time. All of this takes out more human interaction, which ultimately saves companies money.

To give you an example of what we're doing in the Industrial Internet of Things realm, I've actually had the opportunity to work on a project, which involves lights out process. Meaning, you could turn out all the lights and the whole process could keep running because everything is dependent on automation. It's been very rewarding to see vehicles and equipment talking with one another autonomously in this process and to see the benefit of no human errors being able to occur in a process because everything's being taken care of properly by the computers, which also means that people can spend more time designing processes instead of worrying about how they're executed.

Now is an exciting time to be in manufacturing because of how rapidly technology has been advancing and because of the exciting new components of Industry 4.0 that manufacturers are starting to adopt into their processes. We firmly believe that the companies that start adopting these components first are going to be the leaders of their industries and change manufacturing.