ADM show wrap up – IIoT & Predictive Maintenance

The inaugural Advanced Design and Manufacturing show  & conference in Cleveland was a success according to Steven Carlisle, UBM’s Senior Manager, Relationships & Partnerships. “We managed to hit our target attendance numbers in the first day of the two days event”. Here are a few things you might have missed.

Five Industries. Countless Possibilities

The five dedicated industry zones under the same roof (Design & Manufacturing, ATX, MD&M, PLASTEC, Pack), gave attendees easy, comprehensive access to the latest technologies in design and manufacturing, automation and robotics, MedTech, plastics, and packaging. We are optimistic that 2018 will have a sixth zone: IIoT World.

Hot topic IIoT/Industry 4.0 getting traction

IIoT/Industry 4.0 is pegged to change the game for manufacturers and the entire supply chain, and while ADM Cleveland did not make it the central part of the show (IIoT World is trying to change that in 2018), some companies seem to get early adopters with great ROI.  Here are a couple of examples:

“The predictive analytics packages perform time series data analysis, flag data anomalies, and allow the user to correlate the anomalies to equipment failures.  This level of analysis is extremely valuable if we are talking about an aircraft engine, but is extreme overkill for a simple pump station.  Most applications fall somewhere in the middle” indicated Tom  Craven, VP of Product Strategy RRAMAC Connected Systems, a Minnesota-based company.

“From our standpoint, we provide turnkey solutions for getting data from the sensors to our cloud-hosted servers and provide alerts, dashboards, and some level of analysis.  The level of analytics depends on the application and the budget.  Our goal is to provide a low-risk investment with tangible ROI.  The customer can then make an informed decision as to whether they can cost justify additional analytics so that they can determine more precisely how much longer they can run the deteriorating equipment before a failure”, Craven continued.

A German based company present in Cleveland, Relayr.io, showed a solution for combining supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques to proactively predict machine failures and service outages and customized data and analysis models for higher accuracy and fewer false positives.  Steve Neely, Relayr’s IoT Solutions Architect was on site demonstrating how to digitize older equipment taking date from the sensor to the cloud.

Using three months of data gathering and analytics, a Relay.Io customer was able to identify key areas to implement improvements that will result in significant business benefits including:

• 30% reduction in maintenance costs
• 20% increase in machine uptime
• 2% increase in operating profit margin

Bonus:

In a standup-only presentation, Tesla’s co-founder and CTO, JB Straubel, discussed the disruptive shifts that electric vehicles, solar power, and battery energy storage are bringing to the design and manufacturing sector — as well as the rapid growth they’ll deliver.

Stay tuned for more information for the 2018 show ADM in Cleveland.