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IoT in manufacturing tackles waste, fraud and inefficiencies – Part One

Hype: typically it’s a negative thing. But for those tired of hearing about the next big technology, keep reading. Why? Because the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the ways of the retail and manufacturing industries, writes David Stain, the industry marketing lead for manufacturing and field mobility at Zebra Technologies in the first of a two part article.

Dubbed Industry 4.0 for its potential to spark a new industrial revolution ­– IoT describes an environment where barcodes and smart sensors connected to objects give those objects a digital voice. It’s a voice that allows them to connect and share data with one another – and the back office – over the internet. Pretty much anything can have barcodes or sensors attached to them, from people to vehicles, to pallets, to individual products, to name a few.

Data captured from these sensors flows around businesses in real time, providing them with immediate intelligence to see, and make better decisions around the status of their manufacturing lines, what’s selling, delivery performance, the success of marketing and much more. But what is most interesting, is what IoT can do to help tackle some of the most pressing current challenges: food waste, fraud and changing consumer expectations around product information.

A jaw-dropping issue: While the waste of perishable goods is something that retailers are well aware of, recent figures reveal the extent of the problem. Around a third of what is produced is wasted – that’s 1.3 billion tonnes of food with a value of $750 billion a year. Put another way, in 2007, 3.5 billion acres of land – bigger than Canada – was used to grow crops that no one ate. There are a number of factors at play here but retail could account for as much as 25% of this figure through food loss in the supply chain.

In addition to the waste issue, businesses are seeing a change in consumer expectations when it comes to product labelling. People are more interested in where their food came from and how it was grown, harvested, manufactured into a food product and shipped to shop. Some shoppers are even using their smartphones at the deli counter and scanning barcodes. This trend will continue and may well become normal behaviour in the not-too-distant future.

In Europe, it doesn’t take looking too far back to see what has sparked this change in behaviour: concern over food safety. The horsemeat scandal is fresh in the mind of consumers and shows how, in an extended supply chain, it’s easy for fraudsters to pass off fake ingredients as the real deal.

Looking more widely, for instance to China, figures show that 70% of people are not confident in the safety of food supply.

David Stain will explore how IoT can address these issues in the second part of this article publishing shortly on IoT global network.