Maintworld 1/2018

INDUSTRIAL INTERNET
The Industrial IoT
Maturity Model
A new model
is helping to
guide decision
makers along a
successful path
in the manufacturing
space.
Text: STEFAN HOPPE,
Global Vice President of OPC Foundation
MANY MANUFACTURING and industrial
companies have realised that digital
transformation will require changes in
the way they do business. Experts will
tell you that digital transformation is not
about making energy discrete, and process
manufacturing more efficient, but is
about establishing new business models
while continuing to make money from
their old business models.
These changes are so substantial that
many talk about a revolution, namely the
4th industrial revolution. The Industrial
Internet of Things – abbreviated to IIoT
and known in Germany as Industrie 4.0
– is a technology trend that is the enabler
of this revolution, and is bringing about
a transformation in the way we do business.
12 maintworld 1/2018
So, how do you know you are on the
right path? It’s a question that many
company executives are asking themselves
these days. Experts have therefore
established a ‘maturity model’ that aims
to guide decision makers along a path
that leads to success. We call it the Industrial
IoT Maturity Model. Acatech
in Germany has released a study on the
subject, named the Industrie 4.0 Maturity
Index.
This is one of the most important
insights. Many companies think that
all they have to do is connect their
machines to the internet and they are
‘done’. But as always, this is just the beginning.
In their study, Acatech built a
great model, which is pictured alongside
this article.
When it comes to the Industrial IoT
Maturity Model, the age of computerisation
has helped make production processes
more efficient. Many call this the
‘mechatronic’ age or ‘Industrie 3.0’. This
is the first stage of the Maturity Model.
Connecting machines to one another
and to the internet is then the second
stage. For this connectivity to be efficient,
a single data model for information
exchange is required to format the
data consistently. The protocol used for
transporting the data on the other hand,
is irrelevant, although many people tend
to focus on this in error. This is where
the power of open-source industrial interoperability
standards like Open Platform
Communication Unified Architecture
(OPC UA) becomes critical. OPC UA
has an extensible information model, allowing
the easy mapping of many of the
standards used in the industrial sector
today, and allowing for the creation of a
single data model.
These two stages are the “table