Starbucks<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Each Starbucks<\/a> store has more than a dozen pieces of equipment, from coffee machines to grinders and blenders, that must be operational around 16 hours a day. A glitch in any of those devices can mean service calls that rack up repair costs. More significantly, equipment problems can potentially interfere with Starbucks\u2019 primary goal of providing a consistently high-quality customer experience.<\/p>\n \u201cAny time we can create additional moments of connection between our partners and customers, we want to explore and activate,\u201d says Natarajan \u201cVenkat\u201d Venkatakrishnan, vice president of global equipment for Starbucks. \u201cOur machines are what allow our partners to create that special beverage, and ensuring they are working properly is critical.\u201d<\/p>\n To reduce disruptions to that experience and securely connect its devices in the cloud, Starbucks is partnering with Microsoft to deploy Azure Sphere<\/a>, designed to secure the coming wave of connected IoT devices across its store equipment.<\/p>\n The IoT-enabled machines collect more than a dozen data points for every shot of espresso pulled, from the type of beans used to the coffee\u2019s temperature and water quality, generating more than 5 megabytes of data in an eight-hour shift. Microsoft worked with Starbucks to develop an external device called a guardian module<\/a> to connect the company\u2019s various pieces of equipment to Azure Sphere in order to securely aggregate data and proactively identify problems with the machines.<\/p>\n The solution will also enable Starbucks to send new coffee recipes directly to machines, which it has previously done by manually delivering the recipes to stores via thumb drive multiple times a year. Now the recipes can be delivered securely from the cloud to Azure Sphere-enabled devices at the click of a button.<\/p>\n \u201cThink about the complexity \u2014 we have to get to 30,000 stores in nearly 80 markets to update those recipes,\u201d says Jeff Wile, senior vice president of retail and core technology services for Starbucks Technology. \u201cThat recipe push is a huge part of the cost savings and the justification for doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n B\u00fchler<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Just one grain of corn infected with a highly carcinogenic mold called aflatoxin can be all it takes to poison the whole harvest and sicken or even kill people and animals, not to mention the waste of having to throw out the lot when contamination isn\u2019t found in time. Aflatoxin often can\u2019t be seen, smelled or tasted, and it\u2019s not destroyed by heat \u2013 so cooking contaminated food doesn\u2019t make it safe.<\/p>\n Ingestion of high levels of aflatoxin can be fatal, and chronic exposure can result in serious health problems, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute<\/a>. There are about 155,000 new cases a year of cancer caused by aflatoxin \u2013 it\u2019s the leading cause of liver cancer in developing countries.<\/p>\n Since consumers can\u2019t tell if their food is infected, the onus is entirely on growers, harvesters and processors \u2013 more of whom are having to fight the mold as it expands north amid climate change that stresses crops and makes them more susceptible. So the stakes are high for the new corn processing system B\u00fchler engineers developed as part of an innovation challenge.<\/p>\n With the LumoVision optical sorter, corn gets fed from a truck into a hopper above the 6-foot-tall machine, and a vibratory feeder sends it into a chute where it accelerates to 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) a second as it flows in a single layer. UV lights illuminate the corn. A camera on each side of the chute monitors the lighted grains, looking for the telltale fluorescence of aflatoxin infection.<\/p>\n High-speed valves operating compressed air jets \u2013 which can open or close in a thousandth of a second \u2013 simply shoot any contaminated kernels into the rejects bin, letting the rest of the healthy corn pass through into storage or shipping containers.<\/p>\n Weather patterns at the time of harvest, the health of other lots harvested in the area and other relevant data points can be uploaded to the B\u00fchler Insights platform hosted on the Microsoft cloud to augment the machine data. This can then be combined with information from the cameras as they watch the grains pass by, monitored and analyzed using IoT and edge computing to provide a real-time risk assessment on the crop and guide the system\u2019s processes. If the risk is minimal, sorting can be paused while monitoring continues. If the risk rises, sorting automatically restarts.<\/p>\n \u201cThis came at exactly the right time for us, because we were just starting our digital journey toward data analytics and the Internet of Things,\u201d says Stuart Bashford, B\u00fchler\u2019s digital officer. \u201cThe general concept for something like this had been around for years, but the technology never existed before to make it commercially viable. But now it\u2019s all come together in this incredibly rewarding project.\u201d<\/p>\n Chevron<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Deep within a Chevron fuel refinery, one key machine is now talking \u2013 and revealing secrets about its own health.<\/p>\n That chatty piece of equipment, called a heat exchanger, removes the heat from fluids flowing through it as part of the plant\u2019s fuel processing.<\/p>\n In a pilot program, Chevron<\/a> affixed some exchangers with wireless, Industrial Internet of Things<\/a> (IIoT) sensors that collect and send real-time data from the heat exchanger to the cloud \u2013 supplementing information already gathered by the safety and control system.<\/p>\n Data scientists then analyze that fresh data to check the equipment\u2019s health status now, and to predict its condition in the future.<\/p>\n \u201cUnderstanding the health of these exchangers can prevent unscheduled outages as well as optimize when we clean these units,\u201d says Deon Rae, a Chevron fellow and lead of Chevron\u2019s IIoT Center of Excellence. \u201cThat has the potential to save the company millions of dollars a year when scaled across our whole inventory of heat exchangers.\u201d<\/p>\n The company plans to expand that same IoT technology to other pieces of equipment at facilities around the world to similarly monitor their health and forecast their performance, Rae says. Chevron has more than 5,000 heat exchangers in active operations in more than 100 countries. Deploying health monitoring across different pieces of equipment has the potential to provide significant savings.<\/p>\n Toyota Material Handing Group<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Toyota Material Handling Group<\/a> is the largest forklift manufacturer in the world, but its customers require much more than warehouse trucks and equipment. To better serve them, the global business is expanding and enriching its logistics solutions with digital innovation and Toyota\u2019s renowned principles in lean and efficient manufacturing.<\/p>\n By providing solutions with artificial intelligence, mixed reality and IoT, Toyota Material Handling Group is helping customers meet the global rise in e-commerce and move goods quickly, frequently, accurately and safely.<\/p>\n With Microsoft technologies, the solutions range from connected forklift and field service systems available today to AI-powered concepts that pave the way for intelligent automation and logistics simulation \u2013 all designed with Toyota\u2019s standards for optimizing efficiency, operation assistance and kaizen<\/em>, or continuous improvement.<\/p>\n \u201cOur direction is going to more systemizing and logistics solutions, services in digital automation, AI analytics and IoT,\u201d says Toshihide Itoh, associate director and CIO of Toyota Material Handling Group, an Aichi, Japan-based division of Toyota Industries Corporation<\/a>. \u201cWe also continue to improve our forklift trucks, because this is our origin. But customers need more and more efficient logistics and we need digital innovation to accelerate and expand our business.\u201d<\/p>\n Toyota has presented its vision for a future warehouse with lean logistics<\/a> and pre-trained, intelligent forklifts. Enabled with machine learning and IoT services in Microsoft Azure, the vehicles can quickly learn navigation in a virtual model of a customer\u2019s warehouse, a so-called \u201cdigital twin.\u201d Customers can experience the trucks interacting with their physical and virtual environment.<\/p>\n The ability to simulate and visualize a physical environment will help solve one of the biggest challenges in the industry: the long deployment time for customized IoT solutions. Installations can normally take six months to a year, but using machine learning and digital twins can significantly shorten the time.<\/p>\n Electrolux<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Numerous studies<\/a> have shown that bad air outside affects air quality inside homes and offices, entering through ventilation systems.<\/p>\n Even worse, pollutants generated inside from cleaning supplies, cooking and fireplaces can be even harder on your health than what you breathe out on the street, according to the Environmental Protection Agency<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Pure A9 \u2013 an IoT-connected air purifier built with Microsoft Azure<\/a> \u2013 removes ultra-fine dust particles, pollutants, bacteria, allergens and bad odors from indoor rooms. It launched March 1 in four Nordic countries plus Switzerland and, previously, in Korea.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/the-internet-of-things-is-going-mainstream-microsoft-survey-finds.jpg\")
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