Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/594816
10 SMT Magazine • November 2015 eDITor's NoTe THe NeW INDUSTrIAL erA all working together towards a single purpose— a more-efficient, profitable and successful manufacturing operation. With industrial IoT, companies will be able to view real-time data on their manufacturing processes, and compare performance across their plants, or even shifts within their plants. With industrial IoT, they can also quickly scale their production up or down; manage their energy consumption; and even manage, troubleshoot and fix their pro- cesses and plants, even when they are located in different parts of the world. Data plays a key role in all of these. With the forecast of 50 billion "connected" devices by 2020, it's expected that there will be a deluge of data coming from these "things," which means a mindset shift is required when it comes to deciding what to do and how to leverage these data to take your manufacturing operations to the next level. Which leads me to our topic for this month's issue of SMT Magazine—"The Data Factor(y): Looking at the Industrial Internet." In our recent survey regarding data and how they are helping electronics assemblers improve their manufac- turing processes, among the key challenges we found include finding the "right" data and en- suring its accuracy and integrity, and how man- ufacturers can derive intelligence from data. To help you navigate your industrial IoT journey through this flood of data, in this issue we feature a great line up of articles that discuss industrial IoT, its impact on your manufactur- ing processes, and how you can leverage data to help you further improve production opera- tions and efficiency. For starters, Michael Ford of Mentor Graph- ics discusses the core issue within SMT assem- bly industry that needs fixing for the SMT Internet of Things to become viable. Krishnan Ramanathan, a senior research an- alyst at Frost & Sullivan, writes about Industry 4.0 and its impact on the production line. He also talks about opportunities, challenges, and the elements needed to successfully transition into an Industry 4.0 environment. Next, we have I-Connect007's Barry Mat- ties' interview with Portus CEO Bill Moradkhan regarding the benefits of upgrading a manufac- turer's data intelligence to help transform that data into actionable business intelligence and improve business. I interviewed Rockwell Automation's Mike Hannah, who discussed the evolution of man- ufacturing in the era of Industrial IoT and the biggest changes to expect in the production line. He also talked about the importance of investing in the right equipment, systems and technologies to take advantage of the value that the IoT will bring. In the age of big data, hardware is evident- ly no longer the limiting factor in acquisition applications, but the management of acquired data is. Chandran Nair of National Instruments shares how to make sense of data, keep it se- cured, and future-proof it, as well as other data strategies, especially when systems evolve to become even more complex. He also discusses how to manage this explosion of data and make informed decisions faster. Of course, we also have a line-up of other technical articles to add a different flavor to this issue. Gary Burnett Jr. of Burton Industries Inc. explains the six ways that U.S. sourcing can help manufacturers save money. Mentor Graphics' Pat McGoff, on the other hand, dis- cusses streamlining PCB assembly and testing NPI with shared component libraries.