The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is revolutionizing manufacturing and demanding greater productivity. As companies compete to get their products to market faster and cheaper, they need simple solutions to enable agility in their operations – all at the snap of a finger. Since there’s no time or budget for special tools or expensive, highly-trained engineers and electricians, machine builders need products that are easy to use, install and maintain. As you may have read in this past blog post about the Smart Factory of The Future, this need is driving a trend in industrial automation called “plug-and-produce.” 

It’s become quite clear that the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is the future of industry. By now we’ve well and truly covered the point that IIoT is, in fact, not hype. For end users and OEMs, the IIoT, cloud and big data analytics are creating very real business opportunities.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is disrupting the manufacturing industry by eliminating the rigid structure of production facilities and replacing it with flexible, networked production facilities. What does this mean for machine builders? Find out in this blog post, where I share my answers to a few questions about how Belden helped German-based machine builder Erhardt + Abt take advantage of the IIoT by creating an intelligent robot system.

As you watch a Formula 1 car race around a track at speeds of more than 200 mph, have you ever considered who actually makes decisions about things like when to change a tire or pass another car?

Companies and countries around the world are competing to increase their market share in all manufacturing sectors. A key way to compete is to increase productivity, a measure of output compared to input, and it is improved through the use of digital technologies such as those of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).