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The Industrial Internet of Things:
A Solution Set in Flux
The Industrial Internet of Things offers the
potential to enable industrial organizations to
improve performance and enhance competitive
advantage — not only in an individual facility,
but across company’s supply chain and throughout its value network.
Without a doubt, IIoT ”things” – industrial smart
devices that connect to the Internet and can collect useful data – will greatly outnumber people
within a decade. Consider that IIoT things can
include a company’s transportation assets, industrial equipment, products made, and even the containers that carry products across a supply chain.
OpenText, which is perhaps best known as a provider of enterprise content management (ECM)
solutions that excel at managing unstructured
data, is not a company that quickly comes to
mind when thinking about potential suppliers
of Industrial Internet of Things solutions. When
most people think IIoT, they think of using sensor data to improve business processes. Sensor
data would usually be numeric data, and thus
lends itself to being easily structured. Further,
at this point, OpenText does not have any APIs
to sensor devices.
However, as Mark pointed out, numbers by
themselves may not mean anything until a rule
set is built to interpret a particular data point.
Once that rule set is built, either on the device
itself or back in a corporate application, it can be
acted upon. And OpenText does have a solution
that can interpret quantitative data and kick off
the appropriate workflows.
While IIoT clearly has great potential, it is also
clear is that the Industrial Internet of Things
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technologies are not fully mature, with new
applications continuing to emerge. Through its
acquisition of GXS, an EDI and B2B integration
solutions provider, OpenText could potentially
support an IIoT-powered order-to-cash process;
something we have not heard about from any
other supplier.
ARC sees considerable potential. For example,
the smart vending machine is one IIoT application that has been discussed in the media. Cantaloupe Systems, a San Francisco company that
manages vending machines monitors a network
of 100,000 snack and beverage machines scattered across the US.
IIoT is being used to help
employees monitor the vending machines from
afar to assure that items remain in stock, sense
temperature changes that would hurt product
integrity, and even detect thieves.
But IIoT vendor-managed inventory (VMI)
processes are capable of more. At Cantaloupe Systems people are still part of the work flow. If an
employee notices imminent product shortages,
he or she must manually kick off the replenishment process. It would be possible to automate
this by distributing the intelligence. In other
words, by moving intelligence from corporate
systems and human beings to local machines.
The IIoT sensors on the machine could have min/
max replenishment logic and even kick off EDI
purchase orders when the vending machine’s
inventory drops below the preset minimum.
When the machine is loaded with new inventory,
it could kick off a receipt of goods electronic message, kicking off a payment process.
Beyond VMI, it is easy to see that IIoT could be
used to enable a more automated order-to-cash
processes across a variety of logistics, trading
partner, and predictive maintenance scenarios.