The Fabrication Masters of Industrial IoT

The best visionaries have both the ability to imagine exciting futures and extensive experiences to clearly assess the past. Jonathan Kim of Armada America brings both to this podcast that looks at the outlook and realities of outfitting machine shop floors with better automation through artificial intelligence (AI). Find out when and how AI can help make both authoritative and autonomous decisions based on IoT data coming from the factory floor.

Image credit: Amada America

With 30 years of experience in manufacturing, Jonathan Kim has seen the industry shift from highly manual shop floor processes to the exciting possibilities of automation. Kim leads the Industrial IoT (IIoT) efforts at Amada America, a Buena Park, CA-based company that specializes in building intelligent machine tools for fabrication in smart factories.

As IIoT advances, smart factories are seeing more machines and devices add sensors that can recognize parts by their size or dimension, measure velocity and pressure, and easily execute precision directions. Kim points out that on today’s shop floors automation through IoT requires human oversight, but future smart factories will have machines that function as “expert human observers.”

Kim’s team has developed Influent IoT, a scalable platform that captures accurate and meaningful data, analyzes it, and identifies possible operational threats and processing improvements. In this podcast with the IoT Solution Integrator editors, Kim discusses what he sees as fast-approaching improvements for manufacturers in Industry 4.0. Intelligent notifications that troubleshoot mechanical issues as they happen and facial recognition of operators are two of many changes that are primed for future smart factories. The facial recognition may help with both security and workflow verifications.

Reaching smart factory status is happening faster than expected, mostly due to demands from the COVID-19 pandemic. What the pandemic showed everyone in the industry is that digital transformation is essential. Virtual collaboration, ecommerce, digital asset management, and coordinated online supply chains are among the necessities going forward. Kim describes his company’s COVID-19 learnings and how they adapted with a virtual showroom and virtual tours to continue to support their customers.