Smart Waste Management with IoT

ace it, waste happens. Every supply chain must deal with it. That’s why there are waste management companies and solutions, though they have been hampered by inadequate information flow, which leads to another form of waste – that of time and energy. Now, IoT is enabling smarter solutions, and rapid-application development (RAD) platforms make it faster and easier to implement effective waste management.

UK-based ISB Global, a Value Added Reseller (VAR) of SAP software solutions, is also a Software Solutions & Technology Partner (SSTP) for Waste & Recycling One. That software solution, based on SAP Business One ERP platform, creates smart waste management application based on analytics and mobility.  

Below is the video in which ISB describes how its smart bins systems increase efficiency, lowers logistical costs, and reduces carbon emissions as a result. It also automates the process of identifying the best route for the day’s waste collection needs and the generation of bills based on real time data on the work done.

The sensors pick up on how full the bins are to put in the information that optimizes the pick-up time to when they are full but not yet overflowing. Bluetooth Beacons provide location trackers that can ascertain that they are located where they should be to avoid any confusion or delay for pickup.

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IoT Enables Smarter Waste Management

NFC taps IoT's potential for marketing

Once upon a time, retail stores tried to get our attention with special displays, signs and stickers, but now they can tap into the power of IoT to communicate a lot more than just “New!” or “Special!” The smartphones we carry can convey marketing messages built into the displays or even the product themselves with just a tap.

Thin Film Electronics ASA is a global leader in NFC (near field communication). It creates printed tags, labels, and systems that incorporate memory, sensors, and wireless communication to enable one-to-one digital marketing through just a tap of a smartphone.

Together with GlaxoSmithKline, it deploys Thinfilm's SpeedTap™ tags in interactive “smart” shelves featuring Flonase®  in stores in six Canadian provinces. Customers who tap their NFC-enabled smartphones to the shelves can get information about the product at the moment of decision.

Matt Bright, Senior Director of Product and Technical Marketing, Thinfilm, spoke with us about why the “smart” shelves are just the tip of the iceberg in IoT marketing. We're not only talking about delivering marketing messages, but being able to customize and adapt to them and pick up the trail of the customer journey even beyond the buying decision.

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Tying the Physical and Digital in NFC

Automation Will Define Industry 4.0

pic from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Factory_Automation_Robotics_Palettizing_Bread.jpg

As the Industrial Internet revolutionizes manufacturing, the essential difference between the automation of the past and Industry 4.0 automation is scale.

The linking of the physical and digital in the Internet of Things has enabled manufacturing’s next evolution: the Industrial Internet, or Industry 4.0. Shawn Fitzgerald, vice president of marketing at Thomas, recently shared some insights on the effects of increasing automation and sensor integration.

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The Future is Automated

Increasing IoT Investment for Supply Chain

At the beginning of 2017, IDC published its forecast for worldwide spending on the Internet of Things (IoT). It came up with the figure of $737 billion for spending on IoT in 2016 to cover organizational investments “in the hardware, software, services, and connectivity” it requires. That amount would continue to grow based at “a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.6% over the 2015-2020 forecast period, reaching $1.29 trillion in 2020,” the firm projected.

A huge chunk of that is to come from industry. In fact, IDC’s estimates allocate the lion’s share of IoT investments in 2016 to that sector and found that it involved several large investment amounts. For the 2016, investment in IoT for manufacturing operations would have amounted to $102.5 billion. It also involved a chunk of investment in logistics, specifically freight monitoring  to the tune of $55.9 billion.

The motivation for such hefty investment at this time, according to IoT World’s report Manufacturing IoT & Supply Chain Transformation in 2017 (registration required) “is simple: a compelling ROI through increased efficiency, productivity, reliability and safety.”

Indeed, that fits “the formula for the Industrial Internet” that GE set forth in its 2015 Industrial Internet Report. It described the IoT for industry “as a source of both operational efficiency and innovation that is the outcome of a compelling recipe of technology developments,” which are composed of the following parts.

• Data: both from the standard forms of Big Data and the additional streams coming through the sensors that track “equipment, products, factories, supply chains.”
• Analytics that can assess the status of the connected things.
• The definitive core of the business that defines the desired outcomes

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Investment in Supply Chain IoT Grows

It's not just about self-driving cars

Robert Bosch GmbH made headlines this past month as various newsoutlets echoed Bloomberg’s headline: “Bosch to Build $1.1 Billion Chip Plant for Self-Driving Cars.” While it may not quite stray into alternative fact territory, the headlines is somewhat misleading because the chips are not reserved for self-driving cars. Buried within the article is the acknowledgement that Bosch says they will also be used for “smart homes and Internet-linked city infrastructure.” By all measures, it's clear the company intends to be a major player in the global supply chain for connected electronics. 

It’s true that the company is invested in the development of autonomous cars. In March of this year, it GmbH  announced a partnership with the American company NVIDA, which produces artificial intelligence (AI) systems for self-driving vehicles” in which it would  build  an “artificial intelligence self-driving systems for mass market cars” based on NVIDA Drive PX line with Xavier architecture.

So it does make sense that it would be considering the automotive customer, especially if it is true that, as the Bloomberg article states, each car purchased last year “contained an average of nine chips made by Bosch.”

However, the story that Bosch itself  tells about its plans for the factory it is building in Dresden, Germany are not that narrowly focused, as revealed by its press release. 

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Beyond the Headlines: Bosch’s $1.1 Billion Investment

IoT security guidelines

Hello Barbie, one of the connected toys that raises secuirty concerns

The IoT Security Foundation is a "vendor-neutral, international initiative aspiring to be the expert resource for sharing knowledge, best practices and advice." Those resources include the best practice guides, one of which is "IoT Security Compliance Framework." The first version of the framework covers consumer products and markets, but future iterations will cover several other categories, such as medical, automotive and critical infrastructure.

"The IoT is the next evolutionary wave of the internet and, with dwindling costs of technology and low barriers to entry, new products are flooding the market," declared John Moor, managing director of the IoT Security Foundation. The internet of things extends to all kinds of new wearables, as well as connected appliances and smart toys.

The toy category has already raised data privacy concerns, but all types of businesses have to think about privacy issues when designing anything that connects to the internet. What is first hailed as "the 'internet of treats,'" Moor explains, can easily develop into "the 'internet of threats' if these new products do not have sufficient security capabilities."

The question is, What is sufficient security? That's a question the framework seeks to answer with a checklist for users.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/innovation/internet-of-things/building-a-framework-for-iot-security-compliance.html#sthash.WPkYNvNz.dpuf

IoT and the power of location data

Among the buzzwords of today, the popularity of IoT is definitely up there with all sorts of predictions about how many billions the market will grow to by 2020. When it comes to improving logistics, though, IoT is already making a measurable difference. That’s why the companies in the logistics arena are turning to software that capitalizes on the real-time capabilities of IoT.

Earlier this year, AT&T and Eye for Transport (EfT) published their 2016 research findings in a report called The Internet of Things (IoT) in Supply Chain and Logistics. Fifty-nine percent of its 600 respondents identified as logistics providers. Among all respondents, 41% said they already had an IoT solution in place and 23% were planning an IoT strategy.  The overwhelming majority, about four out of five, look for IoT solutions for location information.

Location information is of such concern because so much depends on knowing where the cargo in question is at a particular time. That frictionless stream of data allows for more accurate predictions about time of delivery and precludes the need for a person to have to manually check- in – either by calling the driver or having the driver call or text to let their managers know where they are. 

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Tapping into the Power of IoT for Real Time Location Data

German clouds on the horizon

The possibilities inherent in applying digitization to industry has earned a name of its own, Industry 4.0, with modified spelling when applied to Germany. In Europe, Germany is the leading star of this fourth industrial revolution. Progress on that front has not been as rapid as some had hoped due to some obstacles identified by a Mckinsey and Co. report published in March 2016.  But that is set to change now with the arrival of clouds built in Germany to meet the needs of Germany’s Industry 4.0.

The Mckinsey report, “Industry 4.0after the initial hype” (PDF download )  looks at perception, progress, and problems faced by the evolution of manufacturing in a digital age. It is based on survey responses from 300 industry experts in Germany, the US, and Japan.  In a nutshell, the anticipation raised a few years ago has resulted in some disappointments, as some businesses did not come up with a clear plan and timeline for implementing a digital strategy.  At this point, 60 percent of those surveyed said that they have come up against obstacles to executing digital strategies.

A fundamental problem for some of the companies was finding a way to integrate the data that comes in from various sources, something that is essential to extracting a comprehensive picture of the process to maximize efficiency that doesn’t compromise the data security or ownership when it passes into “third party technology and software providers.”   For the companies in Germany, there’s the additional concern of being certain to comply with the data privacy regulations in place and the distrust of datacenters located outside the country. 

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New IoT Clouds on German Horizon

Security at the Core and More

We're growing more connected every day. In fact, Gartner's latestforecast says that in 2016, we'll see 6.4 billion connected things, and that number will to jump to 20.8 billion by 2020. While all these points of connection and data in transit hold great potential for business applications, they also open up new security challenges.

To get some insight into the direction security is taking in 2016 and beyond, I checked in with Stephane Ibos, co-founder and CEO at Maestrano, a cloud-based platform that provides enterprise applications like data sharing, dashboards, guided tutorials and more.

Ibos believes that the cloud is proving itself as a secure environment for business but that the risks of the Internet of Things (IoT) are only starting to come to light. Securing those many points of data transfer will require innovative solutions. Based on past experience, he is certain that those innovative solutions will emerge, particularly from agile companies, but there are still challenges to overcome as outlined below.

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Security Innovation & the Shifting Mindset

Clouds and the Connected Car

Here we are, nearly at the end of 2015, and we still don't have flying cars. But what we do have are connected cars, and that technological advance has the potential to yield all new insights and solutions. Thanks to the combination of connected cars, analytic engines and the cloud, real-time data and real-time solutions are now possible.
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Connected Cars, Data & the Cloud

Iot enables JIT

"Fast, good, or cheap; pick two." That used to be the motto for manufacturing, as the

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Manufacturing_equipment_095.jpg

reality was you'd have to compromise on at least one of the three. However, today's technological advances like drones and 3D printing combined with advanced data collection make the inventory strategy of Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory more feasible than ever before. As a result, manufacturers now have the possibility of making their supply chains fast, good, and cheap. "This is nothing less than a paradigm shift in industry: the real manufacturing world is converging with the digital manufacturing world to enable organizations to digitally plan and project the entire lifecycle of products and production facilities," observed Helmuth Ludwig, CEO, Siemens Industry Sector, North America.

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JIT: The Promise of Emerging Tech for Electronics Manufacturing

The trust factor for IoT

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We talk a lot about IoT, referring of course, to the Internet of Things. But perhaps we should be thinking of making the T stand for trust. That’s what some are working on now in establishing industry standards to be worth of trust by committing to adopt best practices.

Essentially the OTA's best practices and standards boil down to two overarching considerations. One: Device manufacturers have to consider how they will secure the data collected on their devices. Two: The consumer has to be clearly informed about the nature and extent of the data collected. Having that information allows the potential purchaser to know exactly what they would be getting into with the Internet of Things (IoT) device, and whether or not they consider the gains are worth the risk. Having a universal standard also makes it clear how one company compares to another with respect to data privacy and security.

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Setting the IoT Standards

5G: potential and challenges for the brave new world of IoT

The progression to 5G from 4G is different from the previous advance from 3G because that shift was all about speed and now it's all about connection on an unprecedented scale.

More specifically, this time around, the new factor is IoT, and as Aicha Evans, corporate vice president and general manager of the Communications and Devices Group, Intel Corp.(Nasdaq: INTC), observes, this "new paradigm will require major changes to traditional cellular network topology."

Indeed, the 5G realm will encompass a lot more devices, technologies and participants than anything we've seen before. Consequently, collaboration within the industry is essential to keep the various components in communication with each other and on the same page about standards and plans. 

That's one of the key differences between the upcoming change and previous progressions, and it holds a great deal of promise for, as well as a number of challenges, for the industry.

To get some insider insight into the journey that lies ahead for arriving at 5G over the next five years, The New IP checked in with Evans via email

Read her insights in 5G & the IoT Factor

IoT to boost supply chain to the tune of $1.9 trillion

"We're all connected" served as the tagline for New York Telephone back in the last century.  That was way before people envision the level of connection made possible by the Internet of Things.  We've come a long way and will go much further, according to the forecast of a recent trend report from DHL and Cisco on the positive impact IoT will have for supply chains.
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IoT to Deliver $1.9 Trillion Boost to Supply Chain