Industrial Internet – the most precise crystal ball a company can have?

Everybody wants to know what happens in the future. The best way for a company to predict their future is to know their past. This is where the Industrial Internet comes in: by collecting enough data about your history, you can create a powerful crystal ball that can help predict the future, says Tuomo Härkönen, Director, Head of Product and Services Development at Konecranes.

Connecting your industrial crane to the internet, for example, can create a very powerful tool for collecting data of everything that is, and has been, done with the crane. The term installed base information management sheds light on this process.

By combining different types of installed base information – data that the machine can produce – it is possible to create very efficient data analysis tools. The data can be categorized based on different information: customer data, usage data, production data, maintenance data and condition data. The systematic gathering and storage of all this data is called installed base information management.

If you have gathered enough information from all of these areas and you have the tools to compile this information into a well-managed format, your crystal ball can be very accurate. The more data you have gathered, the more precise your crystal ball can be.

This will give you a far better view of the future. For example, if a customer wants to increase their production by 10 %, you can simulate the situation by adjusting the figures on your crystal ball, i.e. the analysis tools that utilize the data. Analytics and simulations can tell you what is the most efficient way to achieve the 10 % increase in production and what changes need to be made: how the maintenance intervals should be changed, how the production criteria will change and if new investments in some area are needed.

Having this deep-diving knowledge can change the company’s decision-making processes completely. If the company’s decision making was, at its worst, based mostly on result reports and the changes in figures during the last quarter, now you can have a look into the individual production factors in real time to see what the result was actually based on. For example, you can see directly if there were quality problems or production problems.

And finally, the more precise your crystal ball is, the greater your competitive edge.

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