Internet of Things, in short, IoT, is currently a hot trend.
When connected to the Internet, many different things can be possible. So what specifically can we bring to the manufacturing industry?
In particular, what issues can be solved for the small and medium-sized manufacturing industry?

- In the manufacturing industry, "IoT (Internet of Things) is a high-trendy topic.

Hayama

Various organizations including the IIC in the United States, the Industry 4.0 in Germany and the Robot Revolution Initiative Council in Japan are discussing its potentials; and there are activities to establish international standardization. As the world is moving toward the realization of IoT, securing competitiveness is urgent for all the enterprises regardless of its size.

Tazawa

In the same context, some of your bosses just told you that "You are now in charge of IoT" and many of you have searched for everything related to IoT. For the Japanese manufacturing industry where various Kaizen's and automation have been already successful, it might be difficult to imagine the advantages of IoT.

- When introducing IoT to the manufacturing industry, what can we expect?

Hayama

The big goal for the manufacturing industry is the "Equipment Zero Downtime (ZDT)". It is to reduce the factory downtown to zero, which have been caused by equipment and facility malfunction. Depending on the type of industry, the cost of loss caused by one day's downtime is said to be hundreds of millions of yen, so many of our customers want to keep the downtown as short as possible.

Tazawa

Therefore it is our niche market. In general, IoT in the manufacturing industry is the on-site installation of various sensors to collect, analyze various data and connect it to Kaizen. Our component products have already been installed on-site as control and protection equipments that are indispensable for electric systems also function as electrical energy and operation monitoring sensors for electrical equipment and various equipment.

- When mentioning a sensor, I imagine something like detecting vibration, speed and temperature.

Hayama

Basically components such as a breaker and an electromagnetic switch are sensors that detects and controls electricity flow. However, these sensors are not directly connected to the network; so we need to connect it to the network.

Tazawa

Prior to the era of IoT, we had power energy monitoring products utilizing the sensor function in our product line-up that we called F-MPC series. Our proposal is to utilize these products as a starting point to IoT. Installation can be carried out easily by combining the I / O of a breaker or an electromagnetic switch that are already installed in the customer's distribution panel or control panel.

Hayama

Also, the F-MPC series incorporate power monitoring and energy-saving control mechanism in one suite that does not require a programmable controller (PLC) or a dedicated program; once you install the F-MPC, you can start using it immediately from any browser on any computer. It is an example of a prompt but small start of IoT proposal from the Fuji Electric Group.

- I feel that there is not much you can say about IoT when you are only monitoring the energy.

Tazawa

Indeed. Our current proposal is to develop advanced mechanism for IoT and expand its usage not only to conventional energy monitoring, but also to preventive maintenance by equipment and operational management of equipments; equipment condition monitoring and lifetime diagnosis.

Hayama

Electricity monitoring is the basic mechanism for measuring the energy, checking usage, issuing alerts when a certain value is exceeded, and controlling the equipment. Same technical reasons can be applied to operational management. Our customers can have another benefit that is preventive maintenance from electricity monitoring, because it can help customers manage various operations such as machinery equipments, operating cycles, hours, and current of manufacturing equipments.

Tazawa

For many customers, equipment diagnosys is done by performing periodic inspection at a fixed cycle and post-maintenance at the time when the faulty equipment should be replaced. If we can collect data for entire manufacturing line including equipment operation condition, operating cycle and hours, we can proactively perform preventive maintenance prior to its actual break-down.

- You can retrieve a lot of data just by measuring the flow of electricity.

Tazawa

It may resemble "blood pressure" in our human body. We can forecast the health status of the machines looking at the actual operation times and the running-hours as the specification of the machine provides statistical forecast of its lifecycle.
When some activities are stronger than normal, we can assume that the possibility of having an issue is high. In that sense, you can find symptoms of malfunctions/failures via electricity data flowing through equipment before running a thorough diagnosis of the inside of the manufacturing equipment.

Hayama

In terms of collecting data, we have our famous and long-history of technology for breaker and electromagnet switches; so our sensing technology can take accurate data from over-current electricity. However, we have just started product development for IoT; we do not have the capacity to gather all data that customers require at this moment.