In the recent years, with the introduction of Industry 4.0 standards or “4th Industrial Revolution”, corporations in the Manufacturing and Service Sectors are looking at more flexible and efficient ways of running their business. Through intensive studies, they have come to realize the need for a more accurate process to gather information on the way their businesses are run. This is paramount to increasing productivity and future planning for expansion of their businesses.
These are defined as:
- Proper management of resources and investment of Equipment & Manpower
- The dynamics of technological advances on the use in Internet with Software Applications and pervasive growth of IOT devices with System integration
- The way ‘Big Data’ is managed on VPN and Ethernet Servers
- Efficient management of their supply chain, support services to their clients and end markets
- Cost savings of such management practices to their overall business expenditures and resources
Here I would like to show some of the present growth areas in Data Analytic use in different business sectors
Case Study 1: Marketing and Promotion of new consumer products
A key advertising company engages with a Digital Signage company to place such display consoles at heavy traffic malls and major department stores. Consoles come with key facial recognition software applications.
At certain peak periods, the consoles will play certain advertisements and will record the number of people watching the advert with their age profile. They would also prompt certain promotion vouchers or discount coupons that can be downloaded via Bluetooth or QR Code to the audience for them to buy or try the products advertised.
The number of vouchers or QR code vouchers given out is paired with the facial recognition application to give a profile of the audience dynamics to the advertiser by the Digital Signage content provider. In the course of 3 months, they would be able to compile the success or failure of the promoted products and the popularity of the product to the type of audience that are interested in that product from the advertiser.
Case Study 2: Food and Catering Business
Every ordered dish items are tracked and the popular menu items or newly promoted menu items can be tracked to efficiently minimize unnecessary wastage of items that are not popular. Restaurants are increasingly running their businesses based on data provided by such systems to efficiently run their staffing requirements at certain time periods as well as managing their restaurants to be more profitable. Based on such data they can manage their supply chain better on the actual requirements of the foodstuffs and consumables.
Case Study 3: Energy Distribution
Smart meters are growing in numbers and are increasingly being deployed. The consumers’ metering data are transmitted to backend Scada systems by Ethernet gateways for billing and compilation of the way energy is used in the power grid of that community or city.
The pervasive use of smart meters in upcoming markets in new economies like China and India is improving the efficiency of the Energy distribution market. These controls prevent pilferage and loss of revenue for the power grid utility companies. Data is also accumulated by utility companies so that the power grid supply can be better managed to meet the demand of the consumer market.
These enhancements improve the servicing and maintenance cycle for efficient deployment of machinery during up and down demand cycles.
With most of their control systems contributing to the accumulation and transfer of these data, businesses have a clearer prediction on how, when and the why oftheir business trend patterns.
The prevalent use of Data Analytic systems are never full proof, as Data Security in the IIOT/M2M spatial arena is still being refined. Protection of such data from hacking and manipulation is still being studied by software companies.
With data constantly being sent back from such remote or open interface architecture which is easily accessible by the public, more robust and intelligent router switches with built in embedded firewalls will be in high demand by these systems integrators.
Phoenix Contacts currently has products with such features in the market, and more implementation of such security features and in its future route map. Contact us at marketing@phoenixcontact.com.sg to find out more!