A recent survey conducted by LNS Research revealed that 43 percent of manufacturing professionals don’t understand the Internet of Things (IoT). Although this may be cause for some concern, it’s not entirely surprising. There is something important lurking behind the fact that although most have heard of this ubiquitous term—it’s hard to have avoided it by now—a significant number of quality executives persist in misunderstanding its import.

In this article we intend to take the discussion to the next logical stage, beyond the smart manufacturing plant and over and above servitization (service as an added value to a company's products)—both of which are very important topics and warrant attention. But we also need to examine the practical challenge that manufacturers face based on the assumption that more information is a good thing. With that challenge, executives are becoming hard-pressed to answer the following questions:
• What’s in store for the quality management closed loop when the information bombardment begins?
• How do we prepare for the vast pipeline of potentially actionable data returning to the organization?

 …