What is IoT and Direct Machine Integration?

What is IoT (Direct Machine Integration)?

More than ever, manufacturers are talking about how to apply the Internet of Things (IoT) technology to their businesses to find efficiencies. IoT is a common term used to describe how physical things equipped with sensors and processors can communicate with systems and people to manage resources more effectively. For consumers, IoT is used to connect appliances, security systems, and other things they want to track in their homes and lives. For manufacturers, IoT refers to connecting equipment, tracking assets, and monitoring processes automatically and accessing the information in the cloud.

IoT is All About Connection

ERP systems are the hub for manufacturing information from estimating, routing and quoting, to tracking jobs' costs and financial reporting. Work orders collect material, labor and outside processing costs and provide insight to improve profitability. IoT Direct Machine Integration connects the equipment to the ERP system – so that the actual start and stop time that equipment runs is recorded in the ERP and available to see from any device.

How Manufacturers Are Using IoT

With IoT Direct Machine Integration, manufacturers capture downtime reasons and machine states. They discover the most efficient employees, equipment, shifts, and link information to specific jobs. Many Direct Machine Integration (or Machine Monitoring) platforms have software applications designed for shop floor use. Job data can be pushed from the ERP to the IoT application, and the data from the IoT platform can be accessed by everyone in the ERP. Typically, Direct Machine Integration solution providers charge by the number of connections to things, not the number of people accessing the data. IoT technology, with direct machine integration to ERP systems, gives manufacturers real-time information and long-term insights not possible with ERP alone.