The power of edge-to-cloud integration in manufacturing: How Frontmatec accelerates time-to-value of machine digital services with Siemens and AWS

Manufacturing companies continue to digitally transform their operations by analyzing terabytes of data from their connected industrial equipment on the shopfloor with the ultimate goal of creating smarter, safer, and more efficient factories. At re:Invent 2023, AWS launched the preview availability of the AWS IoT SiteWise Edge on Siemens Industrial Edge Marketplace. Now, customers can easily ingest their Operational Technology (OT) data and accelerate their digital transformation journey from edge-to-cloud. One such customer, Frontmatec, a machine manufacturer developing world-leading customized solutions for automation in the food, hygiene sensitive, and utilities industry. Frontmatec leveraged AWS IoT SiteWise Edge on Siemens Industrial Edge to accelerate development of its own customer service portal with offerings for global machine performance management and predictive maintenance.

In this blog post, we share key challenges in driving edge-to-cloud industrial transformation, from integrating diverse data streams to ensuring data contextualization and solution scalability. Discover how Frontmatec’s strategic implementation of this integrated solution enabled them to accelerate the delivery of predictive maintenance and global performance management services, driving efficiency, productivity, and sustainable value for their customers. This case study provides a roadmap for manufacturers seeking to unlock the full potential of the edge-to-cloud continuum, transforming their factories into smart, adaptive, and future-ready operations.

Digital transformation on the shop floor: what do industrial customers need?

Some industrial customers have already started their journey in integrating edge-to-cloud and are looking to accelerate this implementation to cope with cost pressure and talent gap. Others are at the beginning of their edge-to-cloud digital transformation journey, assessing the investments and benefits required to kick it off. There are four categories of needs and requirements from manufacturing customers to pursue digital transformation on the shop floor:

1. Visibility and aggregation of multiple legacy systems across global factory footprint. The traditional industrial manufacturer has evolved its industrial assets footprint on the shop floor for 30 or more years, which has led to the use of a broad variety of incompatible industrial protocols. As a result, manufacturing data is often locked in different silos, but manufacturers still need a holistic view of their assets to remotely monitor and control their production operations.
2. Vision of software-driven manufacturing to align machine, factory, and enterprise levels. Industrial manufacturers are looking for ways to optimize the hardware infrastructure on the shop floor and support flexible and adaptive production processes. To accomplish this, they want to leverage the latest Information Technologies (IT) that are flexible enough for deployment across multiple architectures and multi-level networks.
3. Repeatable solutions for scalable deployments at multiple factories. The lack of integrated solutions to connect the industrial edge to the cloud and ingest the OT data has forced industrial manufacturers to develop their own custom-made solutions. The development of these solutions usually requires large investments into internal or external engineering and IT resources, often targets single factories and, finally, results in complex and inflexible architectures that are costly to replicate.
4. Security requirements across IT and OT systems. Stringent security requirements in both OT and IT operations remain decisive factors for industrial manufacturers to proceed with digital transformation. As it is critical to guarantee uninterrupted production, security policies governing information security, network connectivity and access management need to follow strict standards at the edge and in the cloud.

These four categories of requirements are also important for Frontmatec as they deal with multiple legacy systems and various industrial protocols, aim to transform from a hardware-driven business model to an end-to-end solution including digital services, target to scale these services fast from one machine to over 400 machines, while not compromising on security.

In the next section, we explain the Siemens and AWS edge-to-cloud offering and value of the collaboration for industrial manufacturers.

Siemens and AWS edge-to-cloud offering

As Rainer Brehm, CEO of Siemens Factory Automation, explains in the video below, industrial production needs to be flexible, scalable and adaptive. Siemens and Amazon Web Services (AWS) joined forces to take production to the next level by ensuring IT/OT convergence is a reality for manufacturing customers. The closed loop between edge and cloud is essential for continuous improvements in production and expansion of new applications and solutions on the shop floor.

Using Siemens Industrial Edge from the open digital business platform Siemens Xcelerator, the goal of the collaboration between Siemens and AWS is to accelerate digital transformation journey on the shop floor at scale by creating a seamless edge-to-cloud integration. Siemens’ industry leading capabilities in OT ensure seamless connectivity from machine-to-edge, and AWS provides connectivity and a secure data pipeline from edge-to-cloud. Customers can easily ingest machine data with Siemens Industrial Edge connectors for common industrial protocols such as SIMATIC S7+ Connector, Modbus TCP Connector, Ethernet IP Connector. Siemens Industrial Edge Management is the orchestration software to centrally manage Industrial Edge Devices and applications across one or multiple factories in a convenient, robust and secure manner, thus enabling customers to solve scalability challenges of implementing IoT use cases. With cloud-enabled edge infrastructure, data can be normalized, contextualized, and visualized to then quickly draw actionable insights. Customers have a choice to build their own applications or buy purpose-built applications across the edge and the cloud. For advanced use cases, like predictive maintenance or visual inspection, customers have an option to train their machine learning (ML) models on AWS and deploy them at the edge.

For customers like Frontmatec, the edge-to-cloud integration from Siemens and AWS accelerated time-to-value, provided flexibility in deployment options, and allowed scalability across multiple assets. Frontmatec’s edge-to-cloud journey with Siemens and AWS started with two main use cases: predictive maintenance and global performance management.

How Frontmatec leveraged Siemens and AWS for machine optimization

Frontmatec is a leading machine manufacturing company in the meat industry, with presence in 15 countries and about 2,000 employees. Frontmatec’s equipment processes 88% of pork produced in North America. About 30% of the 255 Frontmatec’s installations are robotic solutions. They started as a traditional stainless steel equipment manufacturer in 1959, but today Frontmatec has a goal to transition towards data-driven smart automation system designer. To further improve the end customer experience, Frontmatec expanded their maintenance services with two new capabilities – predictive maintenance and global performance management, which are data-driven and applicable across Frontmatec’s existing installations and can be easily replicated to new ones:

• Predictive Maintenance: The cornerstone of the Frontmatec’s approach is the shift from reactive to proactive maintenance strategies. Through continuous machine health monitoring, Frontmatec can detect early signs of wear or potential breakdowns before they escalate into costly downtime. This predictive maintenance approach allows repairs and part replacement during planned downtime, minimizing operational disruptions and extending the overall machine life.
• Global performance management: Frontmatec’s services must excel at optimizing operational efficiency by analyzing data patterns and identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies within the production process. This real-time analysis allows for immediate adjustments to machine parameters, thereby significantly increasing productivity and ensuring that machines are operating at their optimal performance. By leveraging data-driven insights, Frontmatec can also customize machine operations to meet specific production needs, further improving production efficiency and quality.

To deliver the described digital services, Frontmatec experienced three key challenges. The first and the main challenge was the integration of various data streams across multiple industrial protocols into a cohesive system. Frontmatec’s machines use diverse protocol standards, including EthernetIP for PLCs, Modbus TCP/IP for power supply monitoring and HTTP for other devices. This diversity presented significant obstacles to achieving seamless data integration and real-time analysis to help companies better understand their operational performance and improve it. The second challenge was the need for data contextualization to transform raw data into actionable insights with the goal to improve machine availability for end customers. The third challenge was the flexibility of the data-driven service setup to allow quick adaptations to the various specific machine configurations.

To address the challenges mentioned above, Frontmatec implemented the AWS IoT SiteWise Edge on Siemens Industrial Edge on one in-house machine and a set of four machines at a North American customer. Frontmatec selected the integrated edge-to-cloud approach shown below, starting with acquiring machine data from different machine components on the shop floor, then processing it and sending it to the cloud for data management and visualization.

Figure 1: Frontmatec’s overarching architecture with Siemens and AWS

When it comes to data collection, Frontmatec leveraged connectors to multiple industrial protocols available from Siemens Industrial Edge, including EthernetIP, Modbus TCP/IP and HTTP. With this, Frontmatec can now provide an aggregated data view around its machines to the customers. Once Frontmatec ingested this data, they process and compress it into a viable format for analysis at the edge, optimizing the cloud usage. The availability of AWS IoT SiteWise Edge on Siemens Industrial Edge and its simple configuration allowed for a seamless data pipeline to the AWS cloud. Essential functions, such as data buffering, ensure data availability at all times, especially in the event of a temporary network outage. The portability of the software on hardware devices of different capacities made it possible to adjust the computing power, and thus optimize the cost according to the needs of the machines, which may have extended or restricted functionalities.

In AWS IoT SiteWise, Frontmatec created virtual models, called “assets”, to structure the information collected on the equipment. These assets can be divided into infinite sub-assets and can be re-used. With this modularity, Frontmatec can model software depending on the machine functionalities. As the diagram below shows, a simple call to a specific asset type, e.g., the power monitor, allows its integration into the storage model and replication across machines.

Figure 2: Frontmatec’s Asset Architecture with AWS IoT SiteWise

As the range of digital services provided by Frontmatec requires interconnection with internal company tools, Frontmatec developed a service portal website. In this context, an API calls AWS creating the data structure, defined in the AWS IoT SiteWise module, to collect the data itself, and finally to automate the machine deployment process. The possibility of choosing the data location allows Frontmatec to always be as close as possible to the end customer and respect certain national data residency policies for industrial data.

Frontmatec’s benefits of edge-to-cloud integration

Deploying AWS IoT SiteWise Edge on Siemens Industrial Edge significantly improved Frontmatec’s efficiency and time-to-value. Frontmatec reduced the deployment time from several hours to just 15 minutes, significantly improving their efficiency and responsiveness in machine delivery to the end customers. Furthermore, the portability of the AWS IoT SiteWise Edge on Siemens Industrial Edge offering across Siemens Industrial Edge Devices of different performance levels and footprints enhanced Frontmatec’s adaptability, ensuring a quick response to changing operational needs. Siemens Industrial Edge central management capabilities allowed Frontmatec to automate the deployment process of the edge applications, simplifying the machine onboarding for application specialists without deep IT knowledge. These benefits allowed Frontmatec to accelerate the delivery of their predictive maintenance and global performance management digital services to customers.

“The edge-to-cloud integration, combined with the Artificial Intelligence technology, offers OEMs like us an unprecedented opportunity to transform our products and solutions into intelligent assets, driving efficiency, performance, and sustainable value creation for our customers in the industrial sector,” says Mathieu Hamel, Director of Innovation and Technology at Frontmatec. “Partnering with the industry leaders like Siemens and AWS help accelerate the journey to realize our vision.”

Conclusion

The end-to-end integration between edge and cloud is a prerequisite for smarter, more efficient, and safer factories of the future. The approach of AWS IoT SiteWise on Siemens Industrial Edge shows the advantages for industrial manufacturers like Frontmatec to deploy the edge-to-cloud solution once within minutes and scale it to realize the value of efficient data ingestion, processing, contextualization and analytic management – enabling the closed loop integration of AI models.

Meet us at Hannover Fair 2024

Frontmatec, Siemens and AWS are present at Hannover Fair from April 22 to 26, 2024. Listen to Frontmatec’s story in the presentation at AWS Booth (Hall 15) on Wednesday, April 24th at 12:30 pm. In addition, explore live demonstrations of AWS IoT SiteWise Edge on Siemens Industrial Edge at the Siemens booth (Hall 9) or AWS booth (Hall 15).

To get started, access the AWS IoT SiteWise Edge on Siemens Industrial Edge Marketplace. The AWS IoT SiteWise user guide will also walk you through how to get started step-by step.