Investigating and prototyping a connected device strategy and solution for industrial equipment manufacturers

Abstract

Shape Technologies makes industrial waterjet equipment that is purchased and used by customers to process a variety of materials (ranging from metal to food). To date the company has not invested in connecting their machines and as a result no engineering, sales or service processes benefit from machine usage or health data. Similarly, the customer service experience is not optimized. Most customers follow a break-fix pattern and engage non-SHAPE technicians for service and replacement parts after their initial equipment purchase. The motivation for this project is to harness recent innovations in and availability of sensor and data storage technology to serve the business of an industrial manufacturing company. This project leverages established Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) use-cases to develop an IloT product and business plan for SHAPE Technologies that would also allow for future iteration and growth in this space. The contribution of this thesis is in three parts. First, it demonstrates many concepts described in the loT literature including transitioning to a servitization business model, deciding which parts of loT to make vs. buy and designing a usable application for industrial users. Second, it demonstrates the value of an inclusive product development process in bringing an organization through a discontinuous technology transition. And third, it provides early insight into the types of data and modeling methods that will enable powerful predictive modeling for SHAPE and its customers. The final result of this project was to develop a prototype IloT application that runs on one in-house SHAPE machine. It was developed in conjunction with a broad team of stakeholders from across the SHAPE organization and is currently collecting an initial data sample and serving as a catalyst for ongoing IloT conversations at SHAPE.