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This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on October 29, 2018 - November 4, 2018

There is no better time for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to adopt Industry 4.0 technologies and reap the benefits, according to Dave Choong, Linear DMS Solutions Sdn Bhd managing director.

And those who are slow to avail themselves of these technologies risk being left far behind, he adds.

“Businesses are losing millions annually because they lack visibility, automation and risk mitigation through predictive analysis [that Industry 4.0 technologies can provide].

“A lot of old industries are going to be wiped out if they do not change. That is why companies like (US retail company) Walmart have been enhancing themselves [by] acquiring technology companies,” he said in his presentation on the “Journey to Digitisation: IoT” at The Edge Industry 4.0 Forum: Embracing Digitisation.

Before companies can even talk about things like artificial intelligence (AI) or big data analysis (BDA), they need to install Internet of Things (IoT) nodes to collect the data.

Choong points out that there will be 30 billion objects connected to IoT 2020 and the industry will be worth US$520 billion 2021. The biggest challenge, he says, is the disparity between industries and technology, as most businesses do not even know how to begin their digitisation journey.

Choong says SMEs can take advantage of low hanging fruit and leverage global cloud infrastructure and tech trends from service providers.

Historically, he says, to get this kind of quality data, companies relied on hugely expensive SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems. Today, as IoT nodes become more affordable, more companies can afford to install SCADA-like systems for monitoring, data collection and automation purposes.

Even machine learning, which used to be considered one of the more complex Industry 4.0 technologies, has become more accessible through the availability of many open-source platforms and communities, not to mention no-coding developer platforms and collaborations with university research centres.

Linear DMS is one of the pioneer companies to go into IoT in Malaysia and its original vision was to help other companies on their IoT journeys. But while it waits for companies to catch on, it has developed its own product range and is going into many different industries.

For instance, it has gone into agriculture, where farmers and plantation owners have been doing things in practically the same way for generations, Choong says.

However, with the introduction of outdoor IoT enablers, such as long-range (LoRa) technology and Narrowband IoT, farmers can install IoT devices on their farms to monitor the plants or livestock and address pain points such as disease outbreaks, pond pollution and survival yield. And automating data collection, they can reduce the number of staff required on the farm,  addressing one of the major pain points — rising wages.

Collecting this data may seem elementary, but Choong said it allows businesses to set parameters, which is a crucial step before it can go into AI or BDA. It could also prompt immediate action to rectify any problems.

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