The Industrial IoT Blog
IIoT Insights by Henry Costa
Tag: Smart Manufacturing
Manufacturing driven by real-time data, connectivity, and automation to improve efficiency, quality, and flexibility. It connects people, machines, and systems to support better decisions and faster execution.
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Communicating Edge Contextualization and Unified Namespace to Leadership
Read more: Communicating Edge Contextualization and Unified Namespace to LeadershipThe team had a problem. Not technical this time. They needed to explain Edge Contextualization and Unified Namespace (UNS) to senior leaders who did not care about protocols or data models. The audience knew their factories well. Directors, VPs, plant…
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AI Meets UNS: Practical LLM Uses on Industrial Data
Read more: AI Meets UNS: Practical LLM Uses on Industrial DataA few years ago, if you told me we’d be using large language models on top of plant data, I would’ve said: “Cool demo. Not sure it survives contact with a real site.” Now I’m more convinced. Not because LLMs…
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Industrial AI Explained. Why Data Is the Real Starting Point
Read more: Industrial AI Explained. Why Data Is the Real Starting PointThere’s a lot of noise around AI in manufacturing right now. Every vendor deck, every conference keynote, every LinkedIn post seems to promise that AI will transform your plant. And honestly, most of the time, I just smile and scroll…
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AI Enabled by IIoT: Building the Factory of the Future
Read more: AI Enabled by IIoT: Building the Factory of the FutureMost conversations about AI in manufacturing skip the hardest part. They jump straight to dashboards, copilots, and predictions, but forget to ask one simple question. Where does the data come from? I’ve spent years connecting machines, historians, SCADA systems, and…
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Digital Twins in IIoT. Where Physics-Based Models Fit
Read more: Digital Twins in IIoT. Where Physics-Based Models FitA lot of confusion around digital twins comes from one simple thing. People mix up the twin itself with the models inside it. They are not the same. A digital twin is a structure. A container that connects data, context,…
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Smart Manufacturing Starts with Dumb Questions
Read more: Smart Manufacturing Starts with Dumb QuestionsIf you want a smart factory, start by getting comfortable asking dumb questions. Not “dumb” like careless. Dumb like simple. The kind of question you might avoid because you think you should already know the answer. After years working across…
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Why i3X Matters for Industrial Data Interoperability
Read more: Why i3X Matters for Industrial Data InteroperabilityIf you’ve spent any time in manufacturing IT, you’ve probably lived through the same story more than once. A machine gets connected. Data flows into a historian or a SCADA system. A dashboard gets built. Everyone is happy for a…
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AI-Ready Data. How UNS and Sparkplug B Set You Up for Manufacturing AI
Read more: AI-Ready Data. How UNS and Sparkplug B Set You Up for Manufacturing AII’ve noticed something funny about “manufacturing AI.” The AI part gets all the attention. The real success or failure usually happens much earlier, in the boring part. How you name data. Where you publish it. Whether anyone can trust it.…
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ProveIt! Conference 2026. Real ROI with Abelara, Tupinix, and Axilon
Read more: ProveIt! Conference 2026. Real ROI with Abelara, Tupinix, and AxilonAt ProveIt! Conference 2026, I sat through a session that felt more like a plant-floor working session than a tech pitch. It was framed as a live, fictionalized case study. The company was Cappy Hour Bottling. The names were fictional.…
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Building Your IIoT Solution Portfolio: From Platform to Practice
Read more: Building Your IIoT Solution Portfolio: From Platform to PracticeIf you are building an IIoT portfolio as a consulting company, the challenge is very different from running IIoT inside a manufacturing enterprise. You are not optimizing a single environment. You are selling outcomes to many clients, across sites, industries,…
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Data Context in IIoT. Why Raw Numbers Aren’t Enough for Smarter Manufacturing
Read more: Data Context in IIoT. Why Raw Numbers Aren’t Enough for Smarter ManufacturingI’ve spent years deep in large IIoT programs. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of tags streaming from shop floors to cloud platforms across very different industries: automotive, pharma, high volume, and highly regulated. And there’s one lesson that keeps…
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My Expectations for the ProveIt! Conference 2026
Read more: My Expectations for the ProveIt! Conference 2026I’m heading to ProveIt! Conference in two weeks. February 16–20 in Dallas. It’s practically in my backyard. No flights. No hotels. Just me, my car, and five days of IIoT demos, vendor sessions, and hopefully some useful conversations with people…