Unlocking Operational Excellence with Industrial Operations Optimization Solutions by AWS and Siemens Introduction

In today’s complex industrial landscape, manufacturers are under immense pressure to reduce energy costs, meet stringent environmental regulations, improve production performance, and optimize operations at scale. Despite increased investments in digital transformation initiatives to achieve these goals, manufacturers face significant challenges in scaling solutions from pilots to production across different use cases, production lines, and factories. The lack of seamless integration between industrial equipment, edge devices, and cloud platforms, coupled with the complexity of leveraging advanced analytics as well as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, hinders customers’ ability to derive actionable insights and drive operational excellence at scale.

Recognizing these challenges, Siemens and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have expanded their long-standing strategic collaboration to redefine how industrial customers optimize operations and transform their vast amounts of industrial data into a strategic asset. Newly released Industrial Operations Optimization (IOO) solutions based on Siemens Insights Hub are now available in the AWS Solutions Library to make it easy to connect industrial facilities to AWS as well as apply advanced analytics and AI/ML for use cases such as asset monitoring, quality management, and energy optimization. With Insights Hub on AWS, manufacturing leaders can take actions to increase throughput, improve sustainability, enhance quality, and lower operational costs across their plants and factories.

In this blog post, we dive deeper into the common challenges industrial customers face with their digital transformation projects and explain how AWS and Siemens have partnered to deliver industrial applications to manufacturing customers that enable them to gain actionable insights and improve throughput, enhance sustainability, maintain quality standards, optimize operations, and reduce costs. We also explore the key benefits of Insights Hub on AWS, showcasing how they empower manufacturers to optimize their operations and drive operational excellence at scale.

Challenges in Digital Transformation at Scale

The pursuit of smart manufacturing has driven increased investments in digital transformation initiatives, and yet manufacturers continue to face a multitude of challenges in identifying and prioritizing the right problems to solve, as well as scaling solutions successfully across different use cases, production lines, and factories to maximize their returns on investment. For instance, a manufacturing enterprise might have major concerns regarding quality in one factory, throughput issues in another, and high energy costs elsewhere. While they aim to address all these problems in a phased and systematic manner, manufacturers often struggle to find seamless digital transformation solutions that are well-integrated within their production workflows and can be standardized and replicated across their operations.

These challenges are further compounded by the diversity of legacy equipment and point solutions, where data is siloed across multiple systems and production sites. This complex patchwork of proprietary infrastructure, systems, and applications requires extensive data collection, development, and technical integration skills, which are non-core investments for manufacturers’ business operations. This complexity slows the digital transformation process if customers were to build solutions from scratch.

With the right implementation strategy in place, manufacturers can unlock the benefits of digital transformation, enabling them to optimize operations, enhance productivity, reduce costs, and drive sustainable growth across their global operations.

Industrial Operations Optimization with Siemens Insights Hub on AWS

AWS and Siemens are leading a new era in industrial operational excellence, breaking down the barriers between IT and OT. Siemens Digital Industries software and AWS Industrial IoT have teamed up to accelerate manufacturing digital transformation through ready-to-deploy Industrial IoT solutions. As a result of this collaboration, new IOO solutions based on Insights Hub have been released in the AWS Solutions Library.

Insights Hub on AWS streamlines the process of collecting data from industrial equipment at the edge and seamlessly transmitting it to the AWS cloud. This data integration allows manufacturers to leverage AI/ML and digital twins to perform root-cause analysis and derive actionable insights. By harnessing these data-driven insights, manufacturers can optimize their operations, enhance efficiency, and drive continuous improvement. Siemens Insights Hub leverages more than 60 AWS native services, spanning from edge to cloud, to achieve these data-driven insights seamlessly.

IOO solutions enable customers to centralize their data and applications in the cloud, allowing them to reuse the same infrastructure and application investments to scale across multiple use cases and production sites cost-efficiently and fast. With a unified data strategy in the cloud, customers can fully leverage their data without the constraints of legacy systems and fragmented infrastructure. This strategic approach facilitates the deployment of ready-to-use end-user applications, built on a common data infrastructure investment, to enable efficient and effective scalability.

Central to our collaboration are the end-user applications designed to deliver quick value to manufacturers, eliminating the need for costly development of custom solutions. By focusing on user-friendly interfaces and advanced visualization tools, these applications aim to simplify the exploration of complex data landscapes. This empowers users to make informed, data-driven decisions, enhancing operational agility and competitiveness.

Currently, there are three Insights Hub packages available, each consisting of a set of applications tailored to address specific operational challenges:

1. Production Performance Improvements with IIoT: Leveraging the combined expertise of Siemens and AWS in Industrial IoT and AI/ML analytics, this suite of applications helps manufacturers address a variety of plant performance issues by contextualizing and correlating data across production systems. This solution includes applications that range from asset monitoring and condition-based alerts, predictive maintenance, quality analytics and prediction, to Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). For example, manufacturers can solve their throughput issues by using the OEE application to see the current status and operational effectiveness of production equipment at granular details and in combination with the predictive maintenance application to avoid or manage downtime.
2. Industrial Optimization with digital twins: Manufacturers can combine IoT and OT with Siemens process and plant simulation capabilities to identify production bottlenecks, and optimize cycle time and costs of production processes by replaying production scenarios in the AWS cloud. These digital twins help compare different production strategies, with what-if analyses, and help manufacturers save time and deliver seamless operations during real commissioning.
3. Energy Optimization with data driven analytics: Many manufacturers know their utility and energy costs from their monthly invoices, but lack granular details such as consumption patterns, KPIs, calibrating rules, energy alerts to manufacture a unit product. Such details provide actionable insights to manufacturers to optimize production schedules, plan batches, and calibrate machines to increase energy efficiency and reduce carbon footprint. The Energy Optimization app helps forecast upcoming energy requirements and take actions to reduce consumption peaks and save costs.

These applications are available as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in the AWS Solutions Library and the AWS Marketplace. They are proven, modular, and out-of-the-box applications designed for manufacturers to readily deploy and optimize their processes. Siemens’ professional services or their factory automation partners can provide end-to-end implementation support for these applications. With this approach, manufacturers do not need to develop highly specialized skills, such as data science, to gain operational insights for optimization. They can prioritize and address their most critical challenges by selecting an appropriate application, and then scale to tackle subsequent issues more efficiently by leveraging other available applications.

This modular approach enables manufacturers to accelerate their optimization efforts and achieve continuous improvement. If customers have a requirement to extend the applications with new capabilities, or even build new ones, they can also use the included license of the Mendix low-code platform, which now also makes the power of generative AI accessible to everyone by integrating Amazon Bedrock. Mendix is suitable for both citizen and professional developers to collaborate on composing, deploying, and scaling industrial applications that are customized to meet bespoke requirements.

Elevating Industrial IoT Through Contextual Data Integration

Siemens and AWS are also co-innovating to elevate Industrial IoT through contextual data integration and foster a more interconnected and intelligent industrial environment. A prime example of this co-innovation is the recent announcement that AWS IoT SiteWise Edge, an on-premises software that simplifies the collection, organization, processing, and monitoring of equipment data, can now be deployed directly from the Siemens Industrial Edge Marketplace to allow customers to start ingesting OT data from a variety of industrial protocols into the cloud faster, removing layers of configuration and accelerating time to value. Because these products are interoperable, customers can now choose when to deploy applications at the edge or in the cloud. For example, some applications require low-latency closed loop capabilities at the edge to control machinery on a shop floor while the same process also needs to be monitored for quality performance, which can be done using Insights Hub applications. This approach of combining edge with cloud computing through integrating the product stack creates a seamless edge-to-cloud data network that in turns enables end-to-end use cases, scale, and democratization of data.

A new Siemens Insights Hub Data Contextualization (DC) application, powered by AWS advanced data contextualization capabilities, represents a paradigm shift in how data from disparate sources can be harmonized and correlated, signaling a move towards a more interconnected and intelligent industrial environment. This application is designed to simplify the complexities of navigating and merging data from various sources, such as machinery and programmable logic controllers (PLCs), with additional information like schedules, batches, as well as information from IT systems. By crafting semantic connections between disparate data sources, it accelerates analytical and visualization workflows. The aim is to create a more interconnected and intelligent industrial landscape, enabling users to efficiently explore and analyze data to expedite insights and business outcomes.

By semantically integrating data from a variety of data sources, Siemens and AWS are paving the way for a future of enhanced industrial operations that are smarter, more efficient, and more interconnected. This collaboration underscores our joint commitment to driving forward innovation and redefining the possibilities in industrial data analytics and operational efficiency.

Conclusion

The collaboration between AWS and Siemens is driving a transformative shift in industrial operations, empowering manufacturers to unlock unprecedented levels of operational excellence at scale. By combining Siemens’ deep expertise in industrial automation and AWS’s leadership in scalable cloud computing and advanced analytics, the Industrial Operations Optimization solutions provide manufacturing companies with a powerful platform to integrate disparate data sources, leverage AI/ML capabilities, and gain actionable insights without having to write any code. With ready-to-deploy, scalable applications tailored for asset monitoring, quality management, energy optimization, and more, manufacturers can accelerate their digital transformation journeys, optimize processes, enhance sustainability, and drive continuous improvement seamlessly across their global operations. Underpinned by AWS’s scalable infrastructure and Siemens’ modular and scalable application design, manufacturers can consistently and cost effectively replicate and expand these solutions across multiple sites, production lines, and use cases. As Siemens and AWS continue to innovate and deepen their collaboration, they are paving the way for a more interconnected, intelligent, and scalable operational excellence initiatives and programs in the industrial sector.

To learn more about the IOO solutions based on Insights Hub please visit the Industrial Operations Optimization page in the AWS Solutions Library. You can also reach out to AWS via the AWS Solutions Library contact link or you can connect with your AWS account manager.