Though the idea has been around for quite a time now, it isn’t yet obvious to all what exactly it encompasses and what all its aspects are. Just as the regular Internet of Things aims to empower our everyday life by interconnecting devices and making them interact and cooperate to bring us easier and quicker solutions for our daily struggles (remember smart coffee makers?), the IIoT is the same concept, but applied to whole enterprises, like manufacturing, services or retail businesses.  So, what we need to have to be talking about a real IIoT deployment, is not only machine-to-machine communication, but also bridging the gap between physical and digital assets within a factory and reducing man-to-machine cooperation by introducing smart automation and machine learning.

A Smart Factory is a concept deriving from IIoT that envisages a production environment as a fully automatized and intelligent network of systems that enables facilities, machines and logistics chains within the manufacturing plant to be managed without human intervention. Moreover, a smart factory is a place where all these things happen thanks to the exchange of data not only between production tools and machines, but also between all elements in the production technology chain. This in turn fuels machine learning so that operations can be carried out more efficiently and bring more savings than it would be ever possible if the production processes remained solely under human supervision.