Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 06 | Page 72

TECH TALK that are networked together. Across vast distances, these machines talk to each other, assess one another’s capacity and coordinate with machines in other geographies to determine the most efficient method to produce the order change. Tarik Taman, General Manager IMEA, Infor 3. Industrial IoT apps The app market for IoT has a lot of potential, not just for revenue, but to make IoT accessible to all sorts of industrial companies. Just like mobile apps took smartphones to the next level, making them incredibly useful in ways far beyond their original design, IoT apps will make IoT technology customisable and tailored for highly specific manufacturing functions. Already, several cloud-based industrial IoT platforms exist. As more customised applications develop, look to see these platforms become centralised data hubs that unify what were once disparate parts of the manufacturing and supply chain process. manufacturing processes, the next step is control. Instead of information being pushed one way – from device to cloud-based analytics – the reverse flow of information enables devices to automatically adjust their operations based on conditions. IoT devices won’t just be sources of information, but interconnected, remotely-adjustable extensions of intelligent manufacturing. In the end, the holy grail of industrial manufacturing is to have a complete feedback loop between real-time information, analytics command and control – sensing and responding all via interconnected data streams. An end-to-end, holistic vision 4. Advanced manufacturing automation Fully automated manufacturing and supply chain processes are the ultimate potential enabled by IoT. If asset performance management, guaranteed uptimes and custom apps are all developments that provide better visibility and insight into 72 INTELLIGENTCIO Picture an order change coming in to a manufacturer. It arrives via a cloud-based information platform, with an approval by the production manager. The request for changes go straight to the factory’s production equipment, located across the globe. These smart machines are equipped with chips and sensors Big Data analytics take into consideration the existing workload, stress and capacity of equipment, the final destination of the goods, transportation costs, delivery times and overall profitability. Then, the entire system automatically optimises operations and begins altering production by pushing control changes right to the smart manufacturing equipment. Any further refinements made on-the-fly are updated across the entire supply chain, so that stakeholders halfway across the world immediately know that their changes are happening. This end-to-end, holistic vision is what IoT brings to industry Many companies are already experimenting with portions of this long-term vision. And yet, for companies who still haven’t begun, the biggest obstacle remains information-sharing infrastructure. Companies often implement systems with their own four walls of enterprise in mind. Sometimes, it goes further – restricted to a department or a division. But with today’s manufacturing being complex and distributed, and with 80% of supply chain data residing with trading partners, companies need to start thinking of information flow as a multi-division, multi-enterprise problem. This requires creating a data infrastructure that can connect all parts of a manufacturing supply chain together. Once that happens, piloting and experimenting with different IoT projects in smaller chunks becomes easier. By 2025, the total global worth of IoT technology could reach up to $6.2 trillion. Businesses who don’t want to lose out need to start gearing up now. ¡ www.intelligentcio.com Ground-breaking payment technologies on Microsoft Azure PCI-DSS and MasterCard Certified Payment Processing Compliance and Financial Control Solutions Retail Management and Payment Systems The deployment of secure processing technology environments is an arduous and costly process. With legacy systems still mainframe-based; and even relatively recent processing platforms burdened down with hardware security, key management and encryption devices; deploying quickly - or changing anything at all - is something not to be undertaken by the faint hearted. The rulebook has now been re-written. NEC Payments ground-breaking approach to software-based security by design; coupled with the power, scalability and speed of the Microsoft Azure cloud is enabling digital transformation and delivering new deployment options for secure processing workload: right here, right now. Please contact us at www.necpayments.com to find out what we can help you to achieve. NEC Payments B.S.C (c) Office 32 Classic Tower, Building 869, Road 3618, Block 436, Seef, Kingdom of Bahrain T: +973 1720 3000 E: [email protected] Licensed and Regulated by Central Bank of Bahrain. www.intelligentcio.com NECPAYMENTS NEC-PAYMENTS NECPAYMENTS INTELLIGENTCIO 73