How IIoT can be Faster, Better and Cleaner

By Martin Keenan

The increasing need for sustainable supply chains and production processes has been well documented, but remains a work in progress. However, IIoT offers the opportunity to deliver sustainability in a vast array of forms, potentially achieving the (currently) impossible…

The unfortunate fact is that traditional supply chains were never designed to be particularly sustainable. Inefficient manufacturing processes that generate excess waste, global transportation and logistics, and single-use packaging add up to a substantial share of the overall human footprint.
Indeed, the typical company’s supply chain generates far greater emissions and wider environmental impact than the company’s own operations, adding up to more than 80 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions and more than 90 percent of the impact on air, land, water, biodiversity, and geological resources, according to figures from McKinsey.

Small and large success stories emerge

However, there are many opportunities to reduce this overhead via increased efficiency, specifically by deploying real-world IIoT networks. Interestingly, these vary widely in scope, but size is no barrier to success here. Indeed, one UK restaurant chain that implemented remote monitoring of their freezers and refrigeration units saved more than £1.25m during the first COVID-19 UK lockdown alone, when employees were suddenly not present for several days to take manual temperature readings.

Without the complete log of correct temperature readings, health and safety procedures would have required all perishable stock to be disposed of across 100 UK sites. The deployment might have been straightforward – attaching mini wireless sensors to chiller and freezer cabinets – but the results have been immediate, according to the company. Due to the new ability to monitor temperatures 24/7, eight freezers have been discovered to be not operating as expected, and temperature incidents have been detected on five others, potentially saving significant wastage through avoiding sudden failure.

Smart cities clean up their act

On the other end of the scale, smart cities are beginning to come online, deploying a wide variety of IIoT devices to save energy and cut pollution – two of the ‘low-hanging fruit’ applications for smart cities. One project that was due for completion in late 2020 is the City of London Corporation’s 12,000-unit smart street lighting deployment across the City of London. The upgrade not only puts highly-efficient LED lights in place of over-30-year-old lighting units, but also has created a field area network (FAN) with self-forming and self-healing functionality – essentially a reinforced mesh network.

This new network in turn allows future third-party sensor deployments to be almost painless, such as air quality sensors, and also more niche applications such as monitoring usage of parking bays or waste bin collection. Real-time fault reporting means that maintenance is targeted, instead of manual as before, and real-time energy reporting enables accurate electricity metering, management and visibility.

Smart agriculture – a growing trend

An often overlooked IIoT sustainability vector is smart agriculture, which recent studies predict could contribute up to 20% savings in food waste – one of the factors behind a recent report from Polaris Market Research which suggests that the global smart agriculture market could be worth in excess of $20.6 billion by 2026 growing at a CAGR of more than 14% from 2019 to 2026. From automated watering and hydroponics systems to intelligent lighting and pest control, there are many IIoT applications in smart agriculture that can generate considerable savings, such as IIoT firm Growlink, and as well as some ingenious next-generation ideas – such as Sensegrass, a soil health startup.

The company has developed a soil intelligence system for fertiliser management that can also  detect crop diseases, improving soil efficiency and crop yield. Using wireless nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) soil sensors linked to an AI prediction engine, Sensegrass creates visibility into the soil quality in real time. This allows farmers to take action when levels drop below the optimum, but also  – crucially – avoid using excessive NPK fertiliser. Figures from the UN’s  Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) claim that 65% of excess NPK fertiliser used in agriculture remains in the environment, which can cause substantial damage to watercourses and the surrounding environment through leaching.

Closing the loop

While IIoT can help individual companies realise efficiencies, the potential to add visibility throughout the supply chain is one of the biggest sustainability wins. With that visibility comes the ability to create a meaningful circular economy, or closed loop, where logistics resources are used to maximum effectiveness, packaging is reused and recycled automatically, and old consumer items are recycled or repaired and reused – all in the same cycle.

This theory applies just as well to b2b as well as b2c relationships, applying granular tracking to pallets and larger containers and cages for example, as well as setting efficiency metrics – just one example of these being the Ellen Mcarthur Foundations Circulytics measuring tool, a dashboard approach to an entire organisation’s sustainability/circularity.

Inevitably, the pursuit of the ‘closed loop’, or wastage-free supply chains is a work in progress, but there are plenty of indicators that IIoT devices at each level can deliver the visibility needed in order for businesses to make meaningful changes. These small efficiencies throughout every supply chain will gradually mount up, creating ever-more sustainable products and services, as well as improving margins for all players. The future should indeed be faster, better and – above all – cleaner – thanks to IIoT…

By Martin Keenan, who is the technical director at Avnet Abacus, which assists and informs design engineers in the latest technological challenges, including designing for Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT manufacturing.

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