IIoT, Small Data and PLM

Big Data and Internet of things is big (sorry about the pun). There is a lot of promise of golden opportunities and discussions on how to get to smart connected products and opening up new business opportunities. And a lot of anxiety among many smaller companies wondering how to approach this. A pragmatic approach and easier start can be small data within industrial IoT (IIoT).

Big Data and full blown IoT can be too intimidating and a too big step for smaller companies. Yet it is possible for them to enter the race without too high investment.

I am assuming that a PLM backbone with all product data is in place. PLM in context of IoT has been mentioned by for instance Beyond PLM and the Virtual Dutchman. There is also an excellent paper from HarvardBusiness School.

The companies that will have the easiest path here is the business to business companies that delivers physical products that are used by another company in a larger system of products. E.g. a conveyor belt that goes into a larger material transportation system. You have control of the conveyor belt while your customer manages the whole transportation system. If your conveyor belt can be a smart connected product we have IIoT.

A large portion of Big Data is unstructured information that you do not know clearly what you will use it for when you design your product. Small data is instead logical additional data sets that you define up front, you know how it is related to other information and you know what the purpose is.

“Small data connects people with timely, meaningful insights (derived from big data and/or “local” sources), organized and packaged – often visually – to be accessible, understandable, and actionable for everyday tasks”

Making a “dumb” product into a slightly smart connected product can give you very powerful information. Define up front what (small) data you want and how to manage it. You can limit the IT infrastructure investment since the amount of data is limited and as a manufacturing company you probably have an IT infrastructure that can manage the additional data. And it is quite easy to know how to relate the information to other information sources. As the small data can be well defined and structured it can easily be combined with your existing well defined and structured data. The typical information sources will be CRM, ERP and PLM. You can combine your new (small) data with your existing product data sources. This can give you new insights.

Aspects that makes IIoT and Small Data attractive

• Sensors are smaller, cheaper and more flexible than just a few years back
• As the data amount is limited it is manageable
• You have a strong product information backbone in place in PLM and/or ERP
• The small data and how it must be related to other enterprise data to give meaning is defined up front. You don’t need advanced analytics tools or experts.

Taking the conveyor belt as an example. Take your existing product and how it is delivered and operated and serviced. Think about: What business benefit do you want if you could get anything from your product in use at your customer? Is it possible to get that data somehow? Then decide what you want to achieve, what data you need and how to get it.

What do you want to achieve?

• Improved service margin – you can do better and more accurate service since you have better insights. Perhaps selling more spare parts.
• You can provide improved operational efficiency for the customer as you can optimize the usage based on the data feedback.
• You can sell a service instead of a product. E.g. you promise a certain output in a certain time period. And you make it happen.
• You can improve the customer experience with new automated functions, remote control or better interaction with other equipment.

Decide up front and design your product accordingly and extend your IT infrastructure to support this. It is still not done by itself, but taking small steps instead of diving into Big Data at once is perhaps more appealing.

Engineering.com has an interesting article about using PLM and IoT in an old industry to create new business opportunities.

Summary

The key is understanding your product, how it is used by your customer and what additional data that could give you an advantage. You have a lot of valuable data already and it can become much more valuable if you add some smart small data on top of it. Use the data and the IT infrastructure you have, add some sensors and connectors and get started.

Tore Brathaug

www.infuseit.com