7 Signs Your Manufacturing Company Needs IoT Solution

Manufacturers didn’t really concern about automation until the global pandemic. Now, the industry is reeling under pressure to meet the increasing global demands, changing customer behaviors. Still, many manufacturers don’t have are clueless over the automation investment, and if you’re one this blog could be an eye-opener for you. 

If your manufacturing company has these signs then assure that you must invest in IoT automation solutions to reduce cost and accelerate productivity.

1. Zero visibility to floor productivity
2. Skyrocketing resource costs 
3. Alarming machine maintenance costs 
4. Troublesome product traceability  
5. Lost, missing or misplaced assets 
6. Limited or zero control over inventory
7. Data silos

Let’s put a deep dive to discuss why these signs can turn fatal for your growth. 

1. Zero visibility to floor productivity

It doesn’t matter what kind of business you’re into. If you don’t have complete visibility or control over your process, you’re gone. In manufacturing, floor productivity involves some complex processes and it is a must to gain complete control over your production process. 100% transparency is a must to oversee floor activities and practice improvement. 

The best way to negotiate this challenge is by automating your production floor. Investing and implementing an IoT shop floor automation solution will help you monitor and measure the overall performance of the production process in real-time, leading to optimized floor activity and better production. 

2. Skyrocketing resource costs

A massive challenge 90% of manufacturers confront every day is skyrocketing resource costs. Scheduling job cards to operators, managing their performance and evaluating their efficiency as well as machine performance is always demanding. Inability to manage resources wisely or inefficient resources will impact the overall production rate. Lack of data about resource planning and efficiency can further add salt to injury. Increasing resource costs would impact your business bottom-line hard.

Here’s the best way to rethink the problem. Top manufacturers have realized the significance of the Industry 4.0 solutions – IoT, AI, ML, RPA – to reinvent their existing manufacturing processes. The IoT-enabled mobile app helps supervisors to assign job cards to resources effectively and monitor their performance on the go. The IoT solution helps management with real-time data to make faster and accurate decisions. This also reduces the impact of overall cost associated with resources as manufacturers can perfectly plan, monitor and necessitate improvement wherever needed. 

3. Alarming machine maintenance costs 

Managing machines and scheduling maintenance always incurs one-third of the cost for a manufacturer and this needs to properly analyzed and improved to avoid productivity decline. The role of machines plays a vital role in the production floor and inefficient machines or machines with faults could delay or impact your customer experience significantly. Unplanned downtimes or unnecessarily planned downtimes could impact your productivity rate. 

How to deal with this challenge? Set up an Al-powered and IoT-enabled app or in other words a predictive maintenance system to monitor the performance, efficiency of machines under different conditions. With the real-time data garnered from the machines during its peak of its performance and other scenarios, identifying the flaws, efficiency problems, or performance issues is simply trouble-free. With a predictive maintenance system, you can track the performance of the machines and can foresee the efficiency problems that might arise in the future. 

4. Troublesome product traceability  

Tracking products that are in the work-in-progress stage is always challenging for manufacturers. Inaccurate and inefficient recordkeeping of products can lead only to a dismal productivity rate and increased cost. 

Having an IoT product traceability system will help you to track the progress of the product under production across every stage and could power with real-time data to evaluate its existence in the process and its health. By this way, tracking your products becomes easier to manage. 

5. Lost, missing or misplaced assets

If I have to point out a manufacturing process that involves a lot of humans yet inefficient with inaccurate data, it should be managing assets. As manufacturing involves a massive volume of assets flowing in and out every day, it is extremely strenuous for the staff to identify, track assets and manage them efficiently. Manual systems or semi-automated systems neither improve asset tracking nor its data accuracy. 

Invest in an RFID/QR-code coupled with an IoT-enabled asset management system and check out the vital parameters. With an RFID tag embedded on each product, identifying the product across different zones or project phases is simpler for staff and this reduces their jobs significantly. IoT ensures real-time data of assets and its location across any part of the project zone and this simplifies the overall asset tracking process. By this way, you’d not only downsize asset management costs but also save time for your staff. 

6. Limited or zero control over inventory

Inventory is the heart of every manufacturing company, and underpinned inventory management could lead to a hard-hit business bottom-line. Generally, identifying products in real-time, keeping up with goods stocking and keeping the records of purchased and disposed products throughout the project is highly challenging for manufacturers.  Inaccurate inventory data could lead only to increased cost. 

Now, let’s rethink the existing inventory with an IoT inventory management solution. The scenario completely changes. The real-time data obtained from the products stocked in the inventory and data about the stocks incoming and outgoing, it is absolutely seamless for staff to track, monitor and keep up with stocks for delivering customer experience better. By all means, the inventory management system will make your entire manufacturing process seamless and robust, in addition to reduced product costs. 

7. Data silos

Siloed data, by no means, is great news for any manufacturing enterprise. Inaccurate and scattered data only could worsen the process of decision making and this again impacts the business bottom line hard. Obsolete data doubles up the challenges of performance, asset tracking, inventory management, resource management of any enterprise and could easily derail your entire customer experience. 

Investing in an Industry 4.0 solution would simplify your decision-making challenges and the data will be available under one roof for making faster and accurate decisions. With an automated solution, you could save a lot of time and cost associated with your business. 

Conclusion

Be it asset tracking, inventory management or shop floor production, managing the processes optimally contributes to the success of your business. And, this can be achieved by investing in an Industry 4.0 solution. Why waiting? Cut down on the cost and double up your productivity using automation and improve your business performance and RoI.