Enabling Smarter Factory with a manufacturing intelligence platform

Enterprises driving Industry 4.0 goals are enabling higher product customizations, smaller lot sizes, higher product consistency, and better integration with the supply chain. Our client’s legacy on-premise system had a disjoint deployment and configuration process that was time-consuming and resulted in the loss of productive hours. The data collection was user-initiated, slow, and periodic with long gaps between data collection and presentation, which resulted in delayed decision making. The system supported limited product tracking capabilities due to isolated machines and manufacturing sites. Further, the unintuitive user interface required extensive training sessions for users to familiarize themselves with the interface.

We collaborated with the client to develop an award-winning, multi-tenant cloud-based manufacturing intelligence platform that offers Quality as a Service (QaaS) and supports service-on-demand. The solution embraces ergonomic design and support for color-blind users. This platform leverages techniques such as statistical process control to create insights from the data received from devices connected via COM ports, IP-based devices, etc. It also supports high-frequency data sampling with manual, semi-automatic, or fully automatic modes of data collection. The insights generated from data can be presented to users as per their needs and this is facilitated through role-based data access, drill-down analytics, multiple language support, and customizable visualizations. The solution was architected to ensure built-in capability for ensuring high availability and high resilience for minimizing downtime in a smart factory.

The solution provides a visual representation of the manufacturing lines to allow faster and more accurate decision-making and end-to-end traceability of parts and products. The use of enhanced rules and derivation logics significantly reduce the data collection time for operators and can cater to the time-sensitive collections with a time window as low as a couple of minutes. The built-in trigger setup feature can capture events in the system and enable workers to receive timely notifications for regular sampling and data collection, leading to improved quality management. With multiple deployment options – SaaS, hybrid, and on-premise, the solution provides maximum flexibility to clients while reducing their overall operational costs. Finally, the intuitive design of the user interface ensures that workers on the shop floor can start using an industry 4.0 solution, with minimal training.