Understanding the scenario

Over the past year, something I have been involved with at work is a concept called the facility of the future. This concept refers to the aim of combining several existing sources of information and business applications within an organization to build rich solutions that support firstline workers and business processes. Today's organizations are facing challenges. While they often have systems in place to collect sensor data, use customer relationship management systems to support business processes, and use several applications on both desktop and mobile to support their firstline workers, they frequently have no idea how to bring these things together. And that is what the facility of the future is all about, as you can see in Figure 16.1:

Figure 16.1 – The facility of the future concept

The facility of the future is all about being connected. It is about the connected vehicle, connected worker, connected equipment...