As part of IoT Week, CRN has rounded up industrial IoT solutions from five significant vendors in the space—Hitachi Vantara, Johnson Controls, Litmus, PTC and Siemens—that are solving big problems for manufacturers, utilities and building operators.

Businesses across the world are expected to ramp up investments in IoT projects this year, and a great deal of that spending will happen around manufacturing.

That’s according to research firm IDC, which said in June that companies in the discrete and process manufacturing industries plan to spend the most on IoT projects out of the $805.7 billion in total expenditures forecasted for 2023, which is a 10.6 percent increase from the previous year.

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With businesses expected to spend the most on manufacturing operations and production asset management this year, the forecast points to a continued need for industrial IoT solutions that can solve significant challenges in these areas.

As part of IoT Week, CRN has rounded up industrial IoT solutions from five significant vendors in the space—Hitachi Vantara, Johnson Controls, Litmus, PTC and Siemens—that are solving big problems for manufacturers, utilities and building operators.

Hitachi Vantara

Hitachi Vantara is giving utilities a new way to protect power grids against climate-related challenges with a set of applications to help them identify and reduce risks to infrastructure.

As part of Hitachi’s Lumada Inspection Insights portfolio, the applications give utilities the ability to “automate asset inspection, support sustainability goals, improve physical security, and reduce risks and impacts related to storms or fires by using powerful artificial intelligence to analyze photographs and video, including LiDAR, thermal and satellite imagery,” according to the company.

Hitachi Image Based Inspections analyzes images and videos captured by drones and other methods using machine learning to safely detect defective equipment for transmission and distribution infrastructure. Hitachi Intelligent Infrastructure Monitoring uses cameras and other IoT sensors to remotely monitor and analyze substation operations.

Hitachi Vegetation Management uses satellite imagery and field insights to analyze the stability of vegetation and make recommendations on how to keep grid infrastructure safe. Hitachi Map provides a “’single pane of glass’ from which users can access essential information, make informed decisions and take immediate action” across all utility assets.

Johnson Controls

Johnson Controls is helping organizations tackle the challenges of reducing the carbon footprint of their buildings with its OpenBlue Enterprise Manager platform, which comes with a suite of apps to monitor and improve energy efficiency, among other things.

With Enterprise Manager, organizations can track, manage and analyze the energy use of their buildings against key performance indicators.

In addition to tracking energy consumption and utility bills, the platform can also calculate greenhouse gas emissions at the building, location and enterprise level. From there, the platform allows organizations to set emissions reduction goals and makes recommendations for how they can achieve those goals at the building level.

Litmus

Litmus is helping manufacturers improve operations by giving them the ability to quickly connect industrial assets and collect machine data for analysis and integration with other systems.

Litmus Edge has more than 275 pre-built industrial drivers that can connect to a wide variety of assets from vendors that include Siemens, Hitachi, Mitsubishi and Emerson. From there, the platform can collect, normalize and contextualize data from these industrial sources.

Using the data, Litmus Edge can run real-time analytics, integrate with other applications and systems and run machine learning models for a variety of use cases, including predictive maintenance, asset monitoring and improving uptime.

PTC

PTC is enabling industrial companies to increase productivity, lower costs, improve quality and maximize revenue for their operations with the ThingWorx platform.

The platform includes everything a company needs to connect disparate industrial devices and applications, quickly build applications, analyze data, control systems and give field staff “safer and more effective ways to engage with physical objects and systems,” according to PTC.

Among the platform’s several capabilities is digital performance management, which has the “power to identify, analyze, and improve bottlenecks while surfacing critical issues and areas of improvement” in a company’s operations, according to PTC.

Siemens

Siemens is developing solutions that help manufacturers take advantage of data from their industrial assets to improve processes and reduce costs.

The solutions from Siemens’ Insights Hub platform include the ability to monitor the performance of assets or factory lines in real time, benchmark equipment for effectiveness, use machine learning models to predict quality and reduce downtime related to materials.

The platform also features the ability to build digital twin simulations of factory floors using IoT data so that organizations can experiment with process changes in software to improve operations.