Connected Factory Solutions using IoT

Manufacturers are increasingly challenged to increase efficiencies and productivity while simultaneously keeping an eye on the costs. To this end, Industry 4.0, or connected factories are heralding a new era that can help gain greater visibility and insights with interconnectivity, machine learning, and real-time data.
The possibilities are endless with factory floors more automated with autonomous robots and automated guided vehicles (AGVs). Making a factory smart means getting clear visibility into operational technology data from machines, supervisory control, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.
Imagine a scenario where you know everything in a factory and could sense, act, and learn from its data. Think of the problems you could solve, minimize throughput constraints, reduce unplanned downtime, increase asset utilization, improve quality, and reduce defects. These require low latency and more high device coordination.

AWS IoT addresses the requirements of the manufacturers who want to modernize their operations. AWS IoT Connected Factory solutions unify and visualize operational data to meet changing market needs. Technology is what drives operational efficiency, reducing costly downtime, and requiring fewer workforce. Deploying machines to seamlessly share information and data, can drive efficiencies, sustained productivity, quality, and improve the bottom line.

AWS harnesses its IoT services, edge computing, data lakes, and advanced analytics to capture, analyze, visualize, and execute on plant floor data, thereby offering a combination of control, visibility, and flexibility. The insights from their factories can help manufacturers make better technology choices, cut implementation costs, and unlock value.

Manufacturers can iterate product designs and updates faster to be more productive and make more custom products at a lower cost. Customer satisfaction will also improve as products are built with fewer defects. Other benefits include:

• Organize, Store, and Manage Data – Customers can gather data from valuable assets to AWS in a simple, structured process, to quickly gain business value from it. The data that is accessed frequently is stored in an operational data store for hot data, while data that is not accessed frequently is stored in an industrial data lake for warm/cold data.
• Get Real-time Operational Metrics Visualization – Visibility into operation technology data is helpful for performing root cause analysis (RCA), especially when a line or a machine goes down without compromising quality.
• Gain Deployment Expertise – Receive a deployment kit at scale to install the solution across all factory lines and plants, with a fixed menu of features providing immediate outcomes.
• Accelerate Business Outcomes – Advanced partner solutions that can achieve business outcomes like predictive maintenance, predictive quality, and remote asset management.
• Improve Operations by Modernizing Assets – Replacing assets can be expensive. Manufacturers can modernize aging assets to mitigate its impact. Modernizing can help factories to predict maintenance and repair parts before they break down. Smart factories deliver value realization with cost savings compared to scheduled repairs, service levels, product quality, improve overall equipment effectiveness, and supply chain efficiency.
• Speed up Innovation – Connecting assets across the factory floor to one platform is the key for manufacturing to remain competitive in today’s digital era. With minimal downtime and insights gained from the resulting digitalization can help lower costs, improve product quality, drive new efficiencies and performance levels, shorten response times to customer requests and market demands, reducing the time-to-results.
• Reduce the cost – AWS offers pay-as-you-go serverless and microservices computing models to reduce the cost of running a connected plant. You can gain rich insights at a lower cost by programming your device to transfer only the data that you need for your applications to the cloud. This reduces the amount of data transmitted to the cloud, increasing the quality and minimizing the cost of the data you send to the cloud.
• Enhanced security – According to AWS, “cloud security is a priority. As an AWS customer, you benefit from a data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations.”

The Connected Factory Solution provides a non-intrusive solution to accelerate your customers’ journey to optimize operations, increase the transparency of factories’ data, and reduce the infrastructure-heavy lifting. With this solution, customers get a consistent AWS IoT experience to accelerate their Industry 4.0 success and modernize manufacturing operations. The platform offers the best way to collaborate with new startups, operational excellence partners, and OEMs.