Productivity and uptime are crucial drivers in the manufacturing industry, where machine downtime can cost more than $1 million per day. Reducing machine downtime has an instant beneficial effect on manufacturing production efficiency and output. However, without accurate information on the true amount and causes of downtime, it can be difficult to identify how it can be reduced. Machine-to-machine (M2M) is a rapidly growing industry and has already been established in many areas of our day-to-day lives. It is fueling innovation enabling vast applications that improve personal safety, business results, processes and productivity and performance and reduced costs.

The vast majority of opportunities for M2M center on taking data out of machines and integrating it with operational data. For example, remote monitoring data can be incorporated into customer-relationship management systems for logging service and maintenance history.

More and more equipment produced today is intelligent devices, based on PLC, CNC, SCADA and PC technologies. With some level of wired or wireless connectivity now standard on these machines, industrial manufacturers are remotely collecting, monitoring and analyzing the machine data. The result is reduced cost, improved uptime, additional revenue opportunities from connected products and improved customer satisfaction. 

Also, by feeding valuable machine data into CRM and ERP systems, manufacturers can also optimize or M2Mize business processes, such as pay-per-use billing, inventory management and more. From service to research and development to operations to sales -- virtually every part of your organization can achieve value through connected products. 

Berg Insight predicts the number of cellular connections used for machine-to-machine communication to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.6 percent to reach 187.1 million worldwide by 2014. Leading manufacturers are improving uptime while providing higher value to their customers and increasing productivity while cutting costs with connected products.

AT&T and Axeda (News - Alert), a cloud platform provider for connected products and M2M applications, are hosting a webinar, “Maximizing Machine Uptime and Delivering Value for Manufacturers with Connected Products,” on Tuesday, August 14, 2012 at 2:00 p.m. ET/11:00 a.m. PT. The webinar will explore best practices from real-world customer case study examples, connecting to machines, managing the data and achieving innovation and preserving security and achieving scalability as end-user adoption increases.

The webinar is geared toward everyone from M2M developers to solution architects, product managers, VP operations, VP production and development managers. To register, click here.

Want to learn more about M2M technologies? Then be sure to check out the M2M Evolution Conference, collocated with ITEXPO West 2012 taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. The M2M Evolution Conference is for industry professionals interested in capitalizing on a rapidly growing segment of the telecom industry. The M2M Evolution Conference embraces the any-to-any strategy of the Internet today. Co-sponsored by TMC (News - Alert) Partner Crossfire Media, it showcases the solutions, and examines the data strategies and technological requirements that enterprises and carriers need to capitalize on a market segment that is estimated to grow to $300 Billion in the year ahead. For more information on registering for the M2M Evolution Conference click here.

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