Siemens Energy Builds Industrial IoT Platform and Drives Smart Manufacturing Using AWS IoT

Collecting and contextualizing data was a challenge for Siemens Energy because every factory and production line operated separately and differently. Some used their own Industrial IoT solutions and a variety of brownfield and greenfield asset types with more than 10 different machine data protocols. Siemens Energy wanted to simplify data ingestion and build a cohesive, standardized system across the company with a secure solution.

“We want to benefit from the technology, the speed of innovation, and the cybersecurity principles of working in the cloud,” says Mario Pilz, chapter lead industrial IoT at Siemens Energy. “And we want to bring that value into the operational technology environment responsibly.”

To ingest data from the company’s equipment into an Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA), Siemens Energy previously had to install specialized hardware on its brownfield equipment. This hardware could be difficult to configure and costly to install.

Seeking flexibility, the company now uses AWS IoT SiteWise Edge, which makes it simple to collect, process, and monitor industrial equipment data on premises. Siemens Energy saw new opportunities for improvements when it learned that AWS IoT SiteWise Edge added support for industrial protocols from Domatica. With these data processing capabilities, Siemens Energy can ingest data from more than 10 industrial protocols, including Modbus.

“Even non–IT experts can onboard a bare-bones industry PC in 10 minutes to a fully connected and protected Industrial IoT edge, which is a game changer for us and essential to our strategy,” says Pilz. Using AWS IoT SiteWise Edge and Domatica EasyEdge, Siemens Energy can connect and monitor a variety of assets, such as computer numerical control machines, robots, and power meters across 18 global factories. Thus, the company can now monitor production processes and energy usage and predict maintenance needs at a global scale.

Using AWS IoT SiteWise Edge, Siemens Energy onboarded new and legacy equipment to its solution without requiring additional hardware. The solution is deployed and updated from a central shared-services AWS account into individual factory AWS accounts. Factory managers and engineers can connect equipment to the cloud simply by submitting support tickets to the company’s Industrial IoT team, and the rest of the process of installation, configuration, and protection is highly automated for the shop floor staff. “Users like this smooth setup,” says Pilz. “Factories buy a piece of hardware, and we basically take care of the setup.”

Data that the company collects from its equipment is stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), object storage built to retrieve virtually any amount of data from anywhere. To create centralized dashboards for its operational data, Siemens Energy uses Amazon Managed Grafana—a scalable and secure data visualization solution for operational data sources.

Benefiting from the optimized costs under a pay-as-you-go model, the company scaled to support 30 custom use cases with its solution, including equipment maintenance, energy management, and process transparency. “There is no flat fee. It’s all pay-for-use pricing, which is great,” says Pilz. “It’s been cost efficient to bring our data into the cloud.”

Siemens Energy cut down the time it takes for manual data collection by up to 50 percent while delivering higher data quality and transparency using Connected Factory. The company also lowered the costs of its operational technology asset maintenance by up to 25 percent and increased machine availability by up to 15 percent. Local factory teams can now identify anomalies in assets and processes, reduce nonconformance in products, and speed up implementation of projects.

Throughout the project, the Industrial IoT team of Siemens Energy worked alongside AWS Professional Services, a global team of experts that helps organizations realize their desired business outcomes on AWS. Thus, Siemens Energy accelerated its speed to deployment. “The AWS Professional Services teams are intrinsically motivated to get things done quickly,” says Pilz. “They come in with a deep technical knowledge and expertise, especially in cybersecurity.” In 6 months, the company completed a proof of concept at five sites, then 1 year later rolled out its solution with incorporated industrial protocol capabilities to 18 factories globally.

With a data foundation on AWS, Siemens Energy is exploring artificial intelligence and machine learning services to drive production efficiency. The company will continue implementing the Connected Factory solution in the rest of its more than 80 factories. “We can finally collect all the data points we need from our internal operations, securely and with low effort,” says Pilz. “Using AWS IoT SiteWise Edge, we have a fully managed suite of the tools and incorporated protocols to support digitization across our internal operations.”