Resolving IIoT Manufacturing Delays with Smart Edge Monitoring
How one manufacturer improved smart factory performance using NETSCOUT service edge visibility
A recent ABI Research white paper reported that smart manufacturing spending is expected to increase from the $345 billon rate recorded in calendar year 2021 to more than $950 billion in 2030. Previous smart factory investments already have resulted in exponential increases in the number of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices used in today’s manufacturing processes. That represents a vast smart factory technology environment that needs to be visualized and proactively monitored, frequently across distributed plant operations.
For one international company, earlier adoption of factory robotics in its global manufacturing plants was instrumental in helping the business sustain operations during its own COVID-19-driven remote workforce transition, with IIoT devices executing plant floor operations, including product preparation and packaging, in the absence of on-premises personnel.
Although IIoT helped drive successful digital transformation across the manufacturing operations by reducing manual error, increasing efficiency, and cutting operating expenses, these innovations also introduced challenges to the information technology (IT) team tasked with assuring plant performance. This centralized IT team was responsible for manufacturing plant oversight at more than 20 globally distributed plants and needed to visualize and monitor the complex IIoT device environments operating in each of them, including programmable logic controllers (PLCs) used in their factory automation efforts. In this robotic manufacturing operation, precise performance of IIoT is imperative, yet the IT team had difficulties identifying the root cause of performance latency at one plant, with network operations noted as the logical culprit.
By using the deployed NETSCOUT Smart Edge Monitoring investment, the company’s contracted NETSCOUT Premium Service Engineer did a deep dive into the compute logic of the PLC environment to prove that retransmissions, not network performance, were responsible for manufacturing latency—which enabled the IIoT environment to be restored to maximized performance.
Learn how manufacturers such as this one use NETSCOUT Smart Edge Monitoring to manage their remote smart factory environments and assure performance of their IIoT investments.