Industry 4.0 refers to the fourth industrial revolution. One of its driving technologies is IoT, connecting physical machines digitally with each other and the cloud.
According to IoT Fundamentals: Networking Technologies, Protocols, and Use Cases for the Internet of Things, by David Hanes (et al.), (2017, Cisco Press), p 932-933, 1208-1209:
In the airplane industry, preflight security checks involved a lot of manual work—each and every piece of essential equipment had to be checked off a list for the flight to be considered safe. On average, this took 6.5 hours per plane.
By integrating RFID tags into essential safety equipment, for example, the airplane industry made it possible for security staff to use an RFID scanner instead of a paper checklist to make sure that no important parts are missing.
And adding these chips was worth it. The 6.5 hours it took to manually check for the presence of each part could be reduced to 20 minutes this way.
There are many more industries less modern than the airplane industry that can profit from IoT as well.
By 2016, approximately 20 million smart meters had been installed globally, which can send their data automatically to the cloud. One of the areas where this is being used is power consumption in apartments.
Using smart meters and a web interface, tenants can check their monthly energy consumption. This way, it is easier to identify electronics or usage patterns that require a lot of energy, just by comparing the monthly costs.
Without smart meters, it is hard to tell whether the new electric grill you just bought is actually a power hog. You can imagine how much easier it is for the power companies as well: no need to send a technician from apartment to apartment, writing down numbers on paper that then have to be typed into a computer later.
Smart meters make everything much easier.
One of the areas where a lot of man-hours can be saved is semiautomatic maintenance of machines. Every machine part has a certain life expectancy: some fragile parts may last a few weeks, some several years. But sooner or later, physical parts need to be replaced. Most factories rely on their machines running in parallel—once one of them stops, the flow cannot go on.
Detecting machine parts that need to be replaced before they actually break can save the company a lot of analysis work and money. With self-monitoring machines, this is about to become more efficient and involve less human maintenance work. By equipping machines with various sensors to run self-tests and verify that all of their parts operate as planned, malfunctions or old parts can be identified early on by the machine. It can then call for a technician to replace part x or manually check part y. By pinpointing possible problems this way, machine downtime can be minimized.
The same self-analysis functions have found their way into the consumer market more and more as well. Commercial coffee machines have an internal counter that is incremented every time a coffee is made. After x coffees have been made, the machine might blink an LED to prompt you to run a manual maintenance program, for example, to get rid of unwanted deposits. While this isn't too smart, modern consumer 3D printers actually are. Being equipped with a multitude of sensors, they can detect malfunctions, identify broken parts, and fine-tune their own settings while printing.
