ok so this is half a definitions question and half a “am I using the right tool” question, sorry if it’s the wrong sub-forum.
Background: I write the firmware for our soil probes and the pivot controllers on a pecan and cotton operation. Right now it’s 14 ESP32 soil nodes (moisture at 3 depths + temp) talking MQTT to Hermetry over TLS, plus two pivot panels where an industrial PC reads the drive over Modbus and pushes status. We have one dashboard per field and a couple of alarm rules on soil moisture. Works fine, nobody complains.
New ops director came in last month and every slide says “Industry 4.0”. He asked me in a meeting whether our “IoT setup” is “real Industry 4.0 or just IoT” and I honestly did not know what to say. Every article I read either says they are the same thing or draws a giant pyramid with ERP on top.
So two questions:
1. Is there an actual practical difference, or is it marketing? 2. In Hermetry terms, which parts of what we have would count as which? I’d like to answer him with something concrete instead of buzzwords, and also know if there’s a part of the platform we should be using and aren’t.
Short version from someone who has sat through too many of those slides: IoT is the plumbing (things with sensors that talk to a server). Industry 4.0 is a story about factories using that plumbing to run production differently. Your pivots are closer to the second than your soil probes are.
Ha, “plumbing” is probably the word I need for the meeting. But he will ask “so what would make it 4.0” and I still don’t have that.
I had nearly the same conversation with a client last year (greenhouse, not open field), so here’s how I ended up explaining it, mapped to what Hermetry actually has.
IoT is the bottom layer: devices, a way in, and stored data. For you that’s the ESP32 nodes on MQTT, the industrial PC on the pivots, telemetry history, and the alarm rules on the soil profile. That part you clearly have.
The “4.0” story is about three extra things on top of that:
- a model of the operation, not just a list of devices: where each thing is, what belongs to what
- closing the loop: data changing what machines do, not only charts people look at
- connecting the floor to the business side (planning, maintenance, ERP)
In Hermetry those map pretty directly. The model is Sites & Assets (Hermetry Twin): build field > pivot > zone, place the devices on it, and each place rolls up the worst status and open alarms of the devices under it. Closing the loop is the Rules card or a flow sending a command to the pivot when moisture stays low (the pivot panel would need to accept commands over MQTT for that). The business side is webhooks, the REST API or forwarding from a flow into whatever system they use.
If he asks about MES or a “production” module: Hermetry Forge is on the product list, but I couldn’t find a doc page for it, so ask sales what it covers before you promise anything in the meeting. Everything above you can build with what you already have.
The getting started overview has a decent one-page picture of the pieces if you want something to show him: Getting started.
+1 to the Twin bit. Even in my house project, once devices sat under rooms the boards suddenly made sense to other people.
This is exactly what I needed. Told him: we have the IoT layer, the “4.0” part for us would be the asset tree plus automatic actions on the pivots, and anything MES-like we look at separately once I know what Forge covers. He was happy with that, and I got a ticket to build out Sites & Assets for the north farm. Thanks Maria.
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