IoT continues to be a large addressable market worldwide despite the Covid-19 slowdown. McKinsey forecasts that the market will have a potential total economic impact of $3.9T to 11.1T by 2025. However, although the market is large, a Gartner hype cycle chart (Hype Cycle for IoT/Edge, Gartner 2019) shows that IoT is currently in the trough of disillusionment.
While the McKinsey study across the 150 use cases through industry segments such as manufacturing, healthcare, retail, oil & gas, government etc. is accurate, the benefits of this digital transformation are slow to be realized. HPE has been working across all these markets, particularly offering solutions for edge for the last 5+ years, with an emphasis on making IoT real for customers.
The partner ecosystem is critical for success in IoT
An HPE analysis with some of the largest software companies in the world noted that a typical global IoT project realization takes about 15-20 partners. While HPE has a vast partner ecosystem, HPE is partnered with the leading IoT platform provider, PTC, to enable quick implementations of IoT and AR solutions.
Typical use cases cover production asset management, condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, digital twins, quality control, visual remote guidance with AR, amongst others. These can feed into Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) scorecards and other metrics plant managers and others might be tracking. These use cases are applicable across manufacturing, life sciences, oil & gas, public sector and various other verticals. These scenarios typically involve the convergence of operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) systems.
Different ways to achieve results with IIoT, same leadership
A typical solution involves enabling connectivity for the shop floor of a legacy factory. These connections must be secure- something typically achieved via HPE Aruba offerings. Once securely connected, shop floor assets are monitorable and the 1st step in digitization is achieved. Further, using machine learning and AI technologies, software can predict when future maintenance might be required for a robotic arm on the shop floor.
Many customers use machine learning at the edge to scan images of products on the assembly line for real time quality monitoring and real time defect detection. Typical systems also integrate into a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) or a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. A typical solution here would run on HPE’s converged edge system with connectivity software from PTC along with its IoT platform Thingworx.
Several customers will store time series data in a data lake in their data center (or the cloud) for historical purposes or for enabling machine learning. Both HPE and PTC support all the three major clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) as well as various others. Several customers are using HPE’s Data fabric offering (MAPR) to enable data storage and machine learning scenarios. We have seen global scale implementations across automotive, oil & gas, public sector to name a few.
Real customers implementing real IIoT solutions with HPE and PTC
While customers range across many industries, a couple that stood out are Cube Packaging. Cube Packaging produces high-quality, environmentally conscious, and ethically-manufactured packaging products. They were looking to improve manufacturing operation by implementing initiatives to minimize environmental impact while on their digital transformation journey. HPE and PTC solution provided proactive monitoring that helped reduce quality defects by 50%. By streamlining their operations, Cube Packaging was able to double production capacity and gain faster time to insight from processes.
Texmark specializes in contract manufacturing and tolling, and the manufacture of: DCPD (dicyclopentadiene) and its derivatives, resin intermediates, n-butanol, mining chemicals, and aromatic solvents. They were looking to build a refinery of the future. Scenarios ranging from connected workers, asset management, predictive maintenance, and advanced video analytics were involved in this implementation. Texmark avoided a 2x increase in insurance deductible through asset integrity management, a 50% reduction in planned downtime, and actually saw some new business lines and income sources open up as a result of this implementation.
The takeaway: HPE is here to help.
In the current era Covid-19, HPE and PTC are seeing a desire for accelerating of a digital transformation. Some scenarios might be around quicker manufacturing a particular product (vaccines or paper towels) or assisting a factory worker remotely. PTC’s augmented reality offerings running on HPE’s edge platforms are the perfect solution to bring about this transformation via digital twins from other partners. We have seen an accelerated global demand around this. Details on these and other solutions are here.
HPE has various other resources including financing to help your company through these challenging times. Additional details are here.
Ready to have a conversation about your digital transformation? Let us help.
We’re sponsoring Liveworx where our experts will be attending (digitally) and ready to help you find out the best next step, whether it’s your first one or you are well into your journey.
Also, register to HPE Discover (it’s free!), where we will be showcasing all of our IoT solutions for manufacturing, featuring PTC.
