Knitting Industrial IoT Into Textile

Industry 4.0 solutions and digital advances represent great opportunities to increase competitiveness in manufacturing.

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Modernisation has touched every industry. Textile industry is no exception! Even though decade old machines and processes are still in use, industrial IoT is gaining rapid traction in the textile sector. Industry 4.0 solutions and digital advances represent great opportunities to increase competitiveness in manufacturing. The increasing connectivity across machines and factories promises improvement in production, productivity, efficiency, inventory management and waste reduction.

Challenges and opportunities

Manufacturers around the globe have long realised the benefits of connected machines. But the next stage of development is integration of traditional manufacturing industries and smart technology. A typical factory contains equipment from a variety of vendors, with MES/ ERP already in place. Many of the textile factories have decade old infrastructure, acting as a barrier in the way of technological adoptions. These existing equipment, machines, devices, and sensors are not connected.

One of the challenges associated with these brownfield factories are collecting data and moving it to upper layers and IT. Mostly data is collected and transferred manually from every machine to the system. This method of data processing is very slow, not real time and prone to errors. Unavailability of real-time data restricts and delays decision making. These disconnected systems result in process variability and errors that slow time-to-market, add cost and inhibit the improvement, efficiency, effective resource utilisation and quality. These problems results in low profitability. To overcome these challenges, textile industry needs continued push towards enhanced automation. Although this may sound abstract, its impact is tangible and fundamentally changes business models in many organisations.

Connected machines reduces unplanned downtime