According to a recent article by Matt Leonard at Supply Chain Dive, as more Internet-of-things hardware comes down in price we will likely see an increase in manufacturing-as-a-service. This is a new billing model whereby manufacturers will be able to pay based on the actual output of machinery vs making a large capital expenditure to purchase a machine.
“More specifically, IoT allows manufacturing operations to take advantage of the product-as-a-service model when it comes to the hardware in their facilities. Instead of paying full price for a piece of expensive equipment, a manufacturing operation can instead use a lease-like model to pay for a certain number of uses of that equipment as measured by IoT sensors.”
There are a number of other benefits on the horizon that come with using IoT sensors in manufacturing facilities such as visibility into the location of parts and their current status, along with predictive maintenance to improve uptime and efficiencies.
