A Flexible and Reliable Internet-of-Things Solution for Real-Time Production Tracking

The concept of Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR4.0) has sparked the urgency of many manufacturers to revisit their manufacturing processes and search for opportunities to further improved their production output. Unfortunately, it is difficult to improve a process with inadequate data. Many of the SMEs in developing countries are still using manufacturing machines from the yesteryears which do not have computational and connectivity capabilities. Therefore, we developed an end-to-end Internet-of-Things (IoT) solution, which reliably tracks the production performance of manufacturing machines. This paper elaborates on the designs and the rationale behind it. As of the writing of this paper, our IoT system has been deployed in real manufacturing environment and has been running for approximately 90 days on a 24/7 basis without data lost.