IoT and Big Data to accelerate digitalisation of SMEs in the EU

By Puja Sharma

“The world’s data production has grown so quickly that 90% of all it was produced in the last three years”. Maximising production and solving the challenges of manufacturing cannot be achieved without the use of data.

Smart factories are no longer science fiction: 5G technologies, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, additive manufacturing, and automation are now available and ready to transform European manufacturing SMEs into the most efficient, productive, and sustainable factories.

Smart Factories are recognised as fundamental to the future of competitive manufacturing in Europe. There is no doubt that the European Commission has fully understood the potential for the industry to adopt the processes of smart manufacturing. Visibility, connectivity, and autonomy are the key characteristics of smart factories. Nevertheless, these are the few trends that every SME should adopt to follow the pathway of becoming smart factories.

Data, data, and more data

“The world’s data production has grown so quickly that 90% of all the world’s data was produced in the last three years” (2020). Maximizing production and solving the challenges of manufacturing cannot be achieved without the use of data. Factories have to develop the capacities to collect, coordinate, and contextualize the data to ensure their transformation to industry 4.0.

Internet of things (IoT)

The idea is to be able to monitor in real-time all kinds of objects by adding sensors that transform them into intelligence devices: IoT enables automation as never before, with machines making split-second decisions based on real-time data. Industry 4.0 gives you not just smart factories, but also tremendous data to facilitate decision-making in product management and product engineering.

The integration of secure form Internet of Things, Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud technologies, Interaction, and Cybersecurity to support local production of food, Circular Economy, and local consumption, price, training, among others to support regional supply chain, and sharing knowledge across all chains, primary producers, retailers, and consumers in a secure form.

Adopting new technologies can be overwhelming and sometimes it is not easy to understand the medium-long term impact of the investment for a small company of such implementation. European initiatives like I4MS to manufacture the European SMEs have contributed the past years to bringing the industry 4.0 technologies by proposing funding opportunities in European regions through attractive open calls and tools to match with technology providers, grow your network, or find financial support.

Industry 5.0 and digitalisation goals

In industry 5.0, the worker is an asset to the company meaning that the employer has to be willing to provide training and well-being: “The worker is not to be considered as a ‘cost’,  but rather as an ‘investment’ position for the company, allowing both the company and the worker to develop” (Industry 5.0 towards a sustainable human-centric and resilient European industry, 2021). The I4MS training catalogue offers SMEs a list of training addressed to all levels of instruction–Digitalisation provides the industry unprecedented opportunities.

Digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) or robotics allow radical workplace innovation, optimising human-machine interactions will capitalise on the added value human workers bring to the factory floor. By developing innovative technologies in a human-centric way, Industry 5.0 can support and empower, rather than replace, workers; we increase industries’ resilience and make them more sustainable, as per the report by the European commission.