Scenarios and Use Cases
IoE promises industries a higher degree of efficiency and profitability using insights obtained from data about our customers or simply from our operations. New data acquisitions and analysis technologies are making it easier for a large number of industries to adopt the IoE implementations to improve operations. The IoE concepts—whether they are called IoE or not—have already made a difference in various vertical or industries. The list is long, but we have attempted to briefly highlight six main categories.
Discrete Manufacturing
The manufacturing sector is expected to hugely benefit from the IoE technology adoption. There are several types of manufacturing categories and it is probably not fair to group them all into a single category, but we will generalize this time for the purpose of our discussion. The adoption of IoE promises significant benefits related to improving efficiency, productivity, availability, and reducing energy consumption. In addition, as the various processes get interconnected, the ability to capture process-specific data in realtime (or close to it) will help manufacturers to better react to market conditions including customer demand and supply chain issues.We will give manufacturing an in-depth focus in the next chapter.
Oil and Gas
Similar to manufacturing, oil and gas (O&G) industries will benefit from IoE technology adoption. O&G companies are one of these types:
•Upstream companies, which are concerned with exploration and extraction of crude oil and natural gas.
•Downstream company includes companies that refine and distribute processed products. Marathon Oil is an example of this category.
•Midstream company is not a common category since it is sometimes included with downstream, but it mainly involves storing and transporting crude oil or natural gas.
•Fully integrated, or as one of our clients describes his company, from the well to the wheel. Exxon Mobile, Shell Oil, Chevron, and British Petroleum are common examples.
As you can imagine, when we talk about O&G adoption of IoE technologies and processes, we deal with oil rigs, refineries, pipelines, tankers, gas stations, and so on. For each of these, there is a lot to be gained from connecting, correlating, and automating the various processes. In recent projects, we have seen our customers deploy new connectivity models to improve the communication infrastructure and then subsequently move toward advanced remote monitoring and operations for effective field collaboration. With the availability of information comes the next step of gleaning insights and business intelligence using advanced analytics technologies.
Health Care
Like O&G, the health care sector has many categories and subsectors, but we will quickly cover the main challenges experienced by all health care categories.
Health care executives are encountering new challenges in providing quality health care, innovative technology solutions, energy savings, and a magnitude of regulations and reporting standards. In addition to these is the excitement around wearable technologies and how they will change the world of health care. You can then imagine the challenges that health care executives face today. The wearable devices provide new markets for proactive personal health care as well as extended care monitoring. But they also come with major privacy and security challenges.
Transportation
IoE’s benefits to transportation are of no exception. Transportation is a vast world covering multiple areas—fleet management, connected vehicle programs, and positive train control (PTC) to name a few. PTC is a set of functionalities for monitoring and controlling trains in an attempt to increase safety. As you can imagine, a number of sensors (speed, location, safety parameters, etc.) will be providing information to a centralized control system that issues commands to the equipment on the train to ensure that the train is traveling safely. Fleet management technologies have been in action for quite some time now providing companies with safety, efficiency, locations, and maintenance information.
Energy
When we talk about technological advances and the value of IoE, the energy sector immediately comes to mind. The past five years showed a significant advancement in what we call the smartgrid. The main benefit of the smart grid is the information it provides to utility companies about the grid itself and about the consumers of its electricity services. It will also help utility companies in detecting failures and allow self-healing without human intervention. The information provided by the grid will also help to predict and adjust various load patterns.
A true IoE implantation is the energy sector in the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), which is an integrated system of smart meters, communications networks, and data management systems that enables two-way communication between utilities and customers. “Customer systems include in-home displays, home area networks, energy management systems, and other customer-side-of-the-meter equipment that enable smart grid functions in homes, offices, and factories.”*
Retail
With the advancement of communications and e-commerce technologies and processes, the retail sector has been experiencing several shifts and adjustments. At the same time, retail is benefiting from new technologies that bring retails closer to their customers by providing them with a shopping experience and improving loyalty. As we discuss retail in more detail in the following section, we will touch on the major advances in IoE as related to the retail industry. One might argue that there are significant differences within the various retail specialties (e.g., apparel versus grocery chains versus electronics), but at the end of the day the mission is one. The retailers want more information about their customers to be able to have the right product in the right place at the right time and nothing can deliver this better than the frame work and technologies provided by IoE adoption.
* SmartGrid.gov (2015).