Nowadays, the adoption of IoT technologies by SMEs is still in infancy due to the lack of simple and powerful solutions to be assimilated. Current management of documentation and silo-based information in many SMEs is supported on manual operations leading to several faults such as incomplete data about a particular reference, annotation errors, loosing of employees’ ability, among others. Therefore, a digital tool and solution to improve traceability and scheduling by smart connectivity in SMEs, based on IoT technology, is mandatory.
Complementarities and synergies between industrial IoT companies (XYMBOT-INGESER) and manufacturing SME (PINAZO), and the previous phase related with IoT-based solution already deployed and implemented in PINAZO are an asset toward successful implementation of the project.
Based on the high human dependence tasks, the above-described workflow and technical challenges, the solution has the following objectives in six pillars as follows:
1. Manufacturing insights and effectiveness: develop a real-time customize Business Intelligence dashboard (BI) to visualize shop floor Key Performances Indexes (KPIs), providing data-driven ground trust to simplify the decision-making process for company managers.
2. Quality control: develop a produced part traceability based on smart tag data-driven reference system (RFID-based) from shop floor to post-sales customer service.
3. Human-centered information channels: promote operators’ good practices and achievements with other team members in order to empower communication channels, linking different stakeholders from operators to factory managers. New human-centered interfaces will be developed to provide to each operator and manager a personalized view and notifications on assigned tasks, company metrics, expected profits and the priority of each assigned task. In addition, operators could report (via app) achievements and detect issues to the system during their daily activities.
4. Sustainability: develop a paper-free based solution by automated annotation introducing three main innovations: a) eliminate consumption of paper in shop floor (more sustainable factory); b) reduce the operators’ deadtime due to annotation activities (improve operators’ effectiveness) and c) eliminate the fragmentation, misalignment or missing of relevant information.
5. Planning & resource allocation: optimize production scheduling providing the recommended workstation, the proper worker skillset, the number of shifts to be completed and the expected date to be delivered, improving resource allocation and delivery time.
6. New business innovation for SMEs: deploy, test and validate new IoT edge-based and a scalable cloud-based services in a smart manufacturing light house to accelerate the adoption of connected factory solutions in manufacturing SMEs.
The expected solution leverages a data-driven optimal scheduling and human-centered interfaces promoting the development of optimization process to reschedule the production system based on a gradient-free population-based optimization method. The impact is also quantified in terms of simplification of decision-making processes, sustainable and environmentally friendly solution by reducing consumption of paper, better quality control based on improved pieces traceability, among others technical, operational and business benefits.
In future posts, we will be continue writing about technology and business trends for enterprises. The objective of this blog is to provide a personal vision of how digital transformation trends will be impacting in our daily activities, businesses and lifestyle.
By Gerardo Beruvides 
Fernando Castaño, Alberto Villalonga , David Nieto and Rodolfo Haber
Xymbot’s experts on Industry 4.0, Smart-Maintenance, Process Optimization, Machine Learning, AI engineering and Cloud-based solutions for industrial applications.
