Summary

This chapter detailed the reasons why IoT is expected to play a vital role in making the manufacturing industry smarter. We started by defining a few concepts that are required for understanding the domain; outlined the key characteristics of five industrial revolutions; discussed the benefits expected from smart manufacturing; and, finally, covered how IoT patterns can be used to realize automatic inspection.

In this chapter, we highlighted the fact that in the future, manufacturing companies will act more like software companies by following agile manufacturing methodologies and data-driven decision-making. All this entails more collaboration and necessitates a big cultural change. Therefore, unless manufacturing companies actively invest in training employees, as well as address the expected cultural nuances, the aspiration of being a truly smart manufacturing enterprise will fail. An example of cultural change is to move from experience-based decisions to decisions based...