Opinion
Embracing digitally connected 'Smart Industrial Machines'
Published on 13 Mar, 2025 by Jonathan
Our friends at AWS recently wrote a great blog post exploring how to build ‘Smart Industrial Machines’. The focus of this article was primarily around how to deliver value quickly, and scalably to customers by utilising AWS IoT and other services.
We wanted to follow up on that blog post to cover some thoughts at two different ends of the process of building ‘Smart Industrial Machines’, namely:
- Why might you do this in the first place?
- How do I even connect my machine?
1. Why might you do this in the first place?
The answer lies in the additional value you can bring to your customers. Business stakeholders must consider the answer to this question before embarking on a program to digitally connect their fleet of machines.
There are several reasons, but for most of our customers, it is about generating additional revenue as a result of an improved service or capability that can be offered as a result of a machine being digitally connected. Let’s look at some examples:
- Connecting sensors to machines enables us to determine machine health, the state of consumables, and the wear on parts. With this data, we can advise customers on proactive maintenance schedules and consumable or parts replenishment automation. Automating consumables and parts replenishment provides a predictable source of revenue and helps improve the supply chain, and follow-up sales with customers.
- Taking this a stage further, with a strong view of asset health and performance in the field, it may be possible to offer wrap-around service, support, and warranty agreements to guarantee customers uptime for critical infrastructure. A good example of proactive maintenance is our work with Martin Engineering, which reduced maintenance time and increased the up-time of conveyor belts.
- As customers use digitally connected products, a wealth of usage, sensor, process and other data can be ingested and stored for later use. There are a broad spectrum of use cases for this data which can enable you to deliver additional services to customers. The most common is by analysing a wealth of data en-masse and providing customers greater insight into the processes and data for the specific application your smart machine is used for. This enables customers to improve processes, fit within regulatory compliance, or reduce energy or waste.
- Providing valuable actionable data services through subscription can deliver strong recurring revenue growth in a traditional product-only business. In addition, usage data can better inform you how customers use your products, enabling you to rapidly deploy new features through software updates or to have a better voice of the customer when designing new products. A nice example of this is the work we did with Envea to bring new capabilities to their customers through the adoption of cloud.
So, why do this in the first place?
To generate and maintain competitive advantage, and to drive strong and recurring revenue growth by providing customers with seamless value-added services over and above traditional one-off product sales.
2. How do I even connect my machine?
To make an industrial machine ‘smart’ one needs to provide connectivity from the machine and its sensors etc. to AWS. In doing so, there are some paramount concerns. The first is Security. You must understand your customers' security posture and the security benefits a solution built with AWS can provide. On many customer projects, we have worked with the product teams to provide them with the knowledge to position security to their markets and customers.
The second question typically focuses on how to actually ‘connect’ a machine. There are two problems here:
- Getting data from the machine, and potentially processing the data before sending.
- The physical connectivity solution from the machine to cloud.
We work with partners for these, and this simplifies and improves the security of the solutions we help our customers build. Depending on the cost sensitivity of your product, you may opt for a secure industrial gateway provided by partners such as Eurotech.
Where cost is more sensitive, we have worked with customers adopting Raspberry Pi compute modules as the basis for a connectivity solution. Both Raspberry Pi and Eurotech gateways can run AWS Greengrass, which allows us to carry out a host of functions at the edge, and also provide a straightforward route for software lifecycle maintenance.
Our strong partner eco-system enables us to work with customers to define the best strategy for machine connectivity, taking into account customer security requirements, the type of sensors and interfaces that need to be connected, and the price sensitivity of your products - all coupled with the value you are offering to your customers.
I hope this post has provided some additional insights alongside the AWS post, and encourages you to think about how you could connect your Industrial Machines to make them ‘Smart’ and the potential rewards for your customers and your business.