Raw materials and energy have been the foundations of every manufactured product since the industrial revolution. With Industry 4.0, data is becoming more important than ever before, not only to minimize operational costs and increase efficiencies but to wring every bit of product and profit from raw materials and energy.
Decades ago, factories pioneered the Internet of Things (IoT) with the use of technologies such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and programmable logic controllers (PLC). Valuable as they were, and still are, those traditional IoT applications are mainly about controlling robots and other equipment, monitoring production, and identifying problems such as overheating pumps.