International Data Corporation (IDC) India recently released a research report onInnovative Use Cases for the Adoption of Internet of Things in India Manufacturing. 'Product Innovation' continues to be a high business priority among manufacturing enterprises. As innovators actively seek new product functionalities and business models in today's competitive world, IoT is emerging as one of the key tools in this journey. IoT extends the sphere of innovation beyond designing better performing or cost effective products to 'connected assets' that enable new value propositions throughout the useful life of a product from its manufacturing to shipment to the customer's location to its intended performance in the field.
IoT is the most adopted among what IDC calls the "Innovation Accelerators" in India followed by Security, the other technologies being robotics, 3D Printing, natural interfaces and cognitive systems. It is also a technology expected to see significant growth in the next 2 years. According to IDC's forecast, revenue from IoT technology and services for Discrete and Process manufacturing in India will grow from $1.3 billion in 2014 to $3.9 billion in 2020 at a CAGR of 20.1%.
Identification of innovative use cases that make significant business impact become important in such a situation. These use cases should be sustainable from a cost and scalability perspective and for which customers see value and are willing to pay directly or indirectly. The three broad categories of IoT use cases are the following:
• Smart manufacturing - implementation within the factory to continuously monitor critical assets, equipments, process and product parameters for better yield, utilization and proactive identification of issues before they cause any disruption to production. This is not a totally new area of implementation. But there are open standards being developed.
• Connected products - IoT for products giving continuous feedback about their location, and performance after they are put into service in the field, using telemetry for remote monitoring.
• Connected supply chain - IoT for keeping track of inbound and outbound shipments for location related information, timely order fulfillment and critical in-transit parameters such as temperature.
IoT is becoming a vital technology in this spectrum of innovation and has seen a fast pace of adoption from multiple manufacturing organizations and service providers in India compared to other 3rd Platform technologies. "Companies that make IoT collaborative in nature cutting across departments and embedded as part of the product strategy and not just an individual technology implemented on its own will realize the value it offers better and faster" says S Ramachandran, Principal Research Manager, IDC Manufacturing Insights.
