In a recent blog post, Tony Shakib, VP of the IoT Business Unit here at Cisco, described how the "Road to the Connected Factory is made Easier" with some enhancements to validated designs and network guides.  At the Cisco booth at the SPS/IPC/Drives Industrial tradeshow in Nuremberg this week, we are showcasing some specific scenarios and use cases where Cisco Connected Factory really comes to life and delivers significant business benefits.

First, integrated visibility to the controls and network status can be offered over HMI displays or mobile devices enabling operators and specialists to find and troubleshoot downtime causes faster.  For example, one customer brought their average downtime from 4 hours for incidents like electrical grounds to less than 30 minutes to locate and resolve.

Second, in a line down situation where the expert who can help resolve the situation is remote, plant floor collaboration tools and capabilities can quickly tap that expertise.  Again, the key is to accelerate the time to resolve downtime situations (as well as increase the productivity of specialized resources).

The third scenario is incorporating video of the physical environment into factory control applications which then further extends visibility to troubleshoot line down situations.

In the video below, my colleague Doug Bellin, who is a Senior Business Development Manager with Cisco's Global Manufacturing team, and I go through a few of these scenarios in our demo station a couple weeks ago at our booth at Automation Fair.

These are just a few of the industrial scenarios and use cases where a truly connected and networked production environment can drive improved operational efficiency, better visibility and faster issue resolution (while at the same time lowering technology costs by reliably converging control, motion, supervisory, and other plant networks versus physically separate networks).

Are you facing challenges similar to these use cases in your factory operational technologies? If so, please share. If not, let us know what different scenarios where a connected factory solution may be able to help your company. Join the conversation on Twitter, @CiscoMFG.