If you're intimidated at the prospect of connecting your facility to the wider Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Daniel Drolet and Armin Pühringer have a simple message: don't panic—much of what you need to start the journey is already in place.
At their Smart Industry 2015 session, "Is Your Plant Floor Network IIoT Ready? How to Assess and Remediate," Drolet and Pühringer combined to tell an IIoT story of two halves: how to move your network infrastructure from a proprietary serial to an open industrial Ethernet, and then how to connect to and leverage the power of the cloud to drive efficiencies across your facility. Overall, they provided an effective and practical roadmap on how to document and assess the capabilities of your current infrastructure, and then how to develop a plan to bring your control and information network forward to participate in the IIoT.
Drolet, executive VP and partner at PCN Technology, began the session by posing the question, "How do you justify and how do you move to IIoT?" Justifying the move may be the easier part: customers are now favoring standardization of plant networks over proprietary equipment and infrastructure, in order to integrate all data frameworks with the ultimate goals of improving uptime and operational equipment effectiveness (OEE) via more proactive work processes.
To learn more about IIoT, read “Is your plant-floor network IIoT ready?” from Smart Industry.