Five keys of IoT in Industry 4.0

In the midst of the explosion of IoT, Gartner stated that there will be around 20.4 billion connected devices by 2020; automation and connectivity have become the hallmarks of what is known as Industry 4.0. As we move towards the fourth Industrial Revolution, organizations are integrating the new technologies into their industrial processes in order to optimize their performance and improve their productivity. 

In the new connected age, Internet of Things has become the enabler of the digital transformation of organizations, their businesses and their processes. The implementation of the latest technical advances improves the traceability and automation of processes and fosters decision-making. Furthermore, the trends show that organizations will continue to focus on integrating technologies like the IoT in their production chains in order to make them safer and more efficient and to improve the quality of the service. Proof of this is that Industrial IoT market is expected to reach 195.47 billion dollars by 2022.   

Companies are beginning to make major investments aimed at innovating their processes. Predictive and prescriptive analyses in big data, cloud computing, 3-D printing and robotics will attract the bulk of organizations’ net investment. As mentioned above, we are moving towards an increasingly connected industry in which the Internet of Things is defining a new business model that is gaining more and more followers. Indeed, there are many advantages and benefits to applying the Internet of Things in the industrial ecosystem, but we can summarize the integration of the IoT into Industry 4.0 into five keys: 

• It automates decision-making and captures information in real time: The sensorization of the IoT facilitates the automation of operations by optimizing processes and resources, providing valuable information in real time and facilitating decision-making. 

• It lowers overall costs of ownership and improves business innovation: The implementation of IoT in the new Industry 4.0 allows for cost savings thanks to the automation of production chains, enabling machines to take charge of routine tasks and fostering human creativity. 
• It optimizes the use of assets, generating better performance in processes: The integration of these new technical advances allows the organization’s assets to be used more efficiently, fostering improvements in the performance of productivity and improving the quality of the end products. 
• It minimizes idle time in machines and assets: IoT lowers the amount of time that machines are idle, getting systems to be 100% available. By connecting machines to the Internet, organizations can monitor huge volumes of data, which enables them to predict machinery failures and thus lower maintenance costs and improve efficiency and availability. 
• It improves the quality of the service while increasing the competitive advantage: IoT technology applied to organizations’ manufacturing systems optimizes industrial processes, enabling them to be more agile and efficient and contributing to improvements in the productivity of operations. 

As we showed in the most recent edition of the Mobile World Congress, the digital transformation of industry is one of Telefónica’s priority strategies, and Internet of Things is the epicentre of this process of digitalization of companies. In the fourth Industrial Revolution, IoT will play centre stage by spearheading a change in manufacturing systems in all industrial sectors and defining a new more efficient, safer and especially more connected business model: Industry 4.0.