In late January of 2019, after attending a conference on IoT, I met a potential client in Mumbai regarding the use of machine learning in a factory setting. He wanted to know if machine learning could be used in his environment and, if so, what kind of business benefit could he look forward to in its implementation. I discussed a few use cases with him which involved the use of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In business, there are two types of strategies: one is revenue growth and the other is cost reduction. If you are in a business where there is high revenue growth taking place, then you would not bother much about cost reduction. Your focus would be to expand your business. However, if you are seeing steady growth for a number of years and you have stiff competition, then the pressure on you is to not just to maintain your existing customers but also to reduce cost so that you can beat the competition. My client was in this mode of business. Most of the use cases I showed him were of revenue growth, which did not meet his expectation. However, the use case of doing an energy audit in his factory using IIoT caught his attention and he explained that he had a large electricity bill and he wanted me to implement an energy audit to help reduce cost. His next set of questions involved how much of cost reduction he could look forward to versus the investment that was needed to implement the solution. I gave him a small workout with a plan for its implementation, which was received well within his company, although we were doing this for the first time in a factory setting.

This book features one of those solutions, although not the complete one as it would need a separate book to do so. But the solutions in this book will help you get started in IoT and IIoT using machine learning.