AWS IoT SiteWise Year One: Product enhancements, customer and partner stories

At AWS, we build technology to help customers and partners such as Coca Cola İçecek, Yara, Lyell Immunopharma, Hitachi Vantara, Embassy of Things, TensorIoT, Element Analytics, and Seeq solve real world problems like minimizing equipment downtime, maximizing product quality, and ensuring personnel safety. We launched AWS IoT SiteWise in General Availability (GA) in July 2020 as a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize, and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale to help customers to make better, data-driven decisions. AWS IoT SiteWise makes it easy to access Industrial IoT (IIoT) data with asset metadata, apply AI/ML to data, and integrate it with an industrial data lake. Our partners leverage AWS IoT SiteWise to build solutions to unlock equipment data, create near real-time production monitoring applications and modernize their historian infrastructure. As AWS IoT SiteWise celebrates its first birthday, we chronicle in this post some of our major enhancements over the past year, highlight a few of our customers’ success stories, and describe key partner solutions that have integrated with AWS IoT SiteWise.

Generating more value for customers

We constantly shape our roadmap based on the feedback of our customers and partners. First and foremost, security is paramount and we continue to make enhancements on this front. Our customers told us that they want to manage their own encryption keys for AWS IoT SiteWise storage as well as be able to establish a private connection between their Virtual Private cloud and AWS IoT SiteWise. To meet their needs, we launched customer managed encryption keys as well as AWS Private Link support for AWS IoT SiteWise data plane APIs. In addition, in H2 2020, we launched new features that addressed customer requests in the space of ease of data ingestion, added flexibility in defining metrics and transforms, visualization, and edge processing.

Example Grafana dashboard using the AWS IoT SiteWise plugin

For example, our customers told us that they have existing dashboards and custom applications using open source tools like Grafana, and they wanted to add AWS IoT SiteWise data to them. So we launched the AWS IoT SiteWise Grafana plugin which enables them to bring data from AWS IoT SiteWise and visualize it in their existing Grafana dashboards in near real-time. We also added seven more chart types to provide rich data visualization. A comprehensive list of these features and additional details can be found in the following blog – AWS IoT SiteWise: 2020 in review.

AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor

In 2021, we continue to address the most important customer requests in the space of security. For example, we started the year by adding support for accessing AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor portals through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles so that customers can choose between IAM and AWS Single Sign-On as their preferred enterprise identity source for SiteWise Monitor web applications. This makes creating and accessing SiteWise Monitor portals quick and easy for customers already using IAM. Customers also asked to access AWS IoT SiteWise control plane APIs through a private connection, so we extended AWS Private Link support to cover AWS IoT SiteWise control plane APIs. Additionally, their plants are distributed in multiple geographies and timezones, and they wanted be able to perform operations such as timezone conversion when defining their metrics and transforms. To support their needs, we enhanced the AWS IoT SiteWise computation engine with support for additional date and time functions. Customers told us they wanted to be able to downsample their data to improve performance of their dashboards and/or reduce their data retrieval costs. In other cases, when they use the deadbanding feature of AWS IoT SiteWise to optimize bandwidth (by ingesting data into the cloud only when the values change), they wanted to be able to fill in the missing data points so they can retrieve uniformly sampled data. To help support these use cases, we launched the AWS IoT SiteWise Interpolation API. Customers have asked us for the ability to alarm on certain conditions like when a certain measurement falls above or below certain values and they wanted to do this without configuring these alarms individually on thousands of assets. We launched AWS IoT SiteWise Alarms which enables customers to configure an alarm on an asset model and have it automatically apply to all assets from their model. Operators can manage end-to-end alarm workflows from SiteWise Monitor web applications.

In addition to feature requests, customers asked that AWS IoT SiteWise be made available in Asia-Pacific (APAC) regions. To meet their needs, we launched AWS IoT SiteWise in three additional AWS regions – Singapore, Sydney, and Beijing – bringing our presence to seven regions.

AWS IoT SiteWise Edge with AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor web applications deployed locally for users like process engineers to visualize equipment data in near-real time on the plant floor.

We recently launched a few features in our anniversary month. Customers can now configure AWS IoT SiteWise to export their equipment data to their industrial data lake in Amazon S3. Once data is exported, customers can leverage a number of other AWS services. Our customers told us they wanted the AWS IoT SiteWise capabilities to collect, process, and monitor equipment data to run on-premises, and continue to run even when their cloud connectivity is temporarily interrupted. To meet the needs of these customers, we launched AWS IoT SiteWise Edge in Preview last year at re:Invent 2020 and just released in GA. AWS IoT SiteWise Edge brought metrics computation, data access, visualization and SiteWise Monitor applications to the customer edge.

In the remainder of this blog post, we look at how some of our customers are using AWS IoT SiteWise to solve their use cases. We also provide a list of partners integrating with AWS IoT SiteWise to provide domain-specific services and applications that provide customers with even more capabilities and flexibility.

Achieving customer outcomes

When AWS IoT SiteWise launched in GA, we already had several customers and partners using the service, including Bayer Crop Science, Volkswagen Group, Pentair, and Genie. In the past year, we have worked with a number of new customers on their industrial workloads with AWS IoT SiteWise. We highlight just a few of them below.

Coca-Cola İçecek (CCI), one of the key bottlers in the Coca-Cola system, produces, distributes, and sells sparkling and still beverages of The Coca-Cola Company to 10 countries across Turkey, Pakistan, central Asia, and the Middle East, serving more than 400 million consumers. As part of CCI’s digital strategy and vision, the company used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform its 26 bottling plants by building a digital twin. During the project’s first phase, CCI used AWS Professional Services to build a solution for its clean-in-place (CIP) process, a critical sanitation process in the food and beverage industry that cleans interior surfaces of production lines and equipment without disassembly. CCI needed a way to collect and process enormous amounts of industrial data as well as build digital models of clean-in-place (CIP) assets and processes. To ingest equipment data for processing, CCI used AWS IoT SiteWise. AWS IoT SiteWise ingests a large amount of industrial data from CCI plants and enables operators to monitor processes at the edge using Grafana dashboards, an open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application. CCI built the CIP digital solution in 2 months. Within 4 months of deployment, CCI identified over 30 improvement opportunities that resulted in annual savings of 20 percent on electricity and 9 percent on water per CIP system.

Lyell Immunopharma is a biotech company specializing in cell therapies such as T cell reprogramming to cure cancer patients with solid tumors. Lyell uses AWS IoT SiteWise to automate the acquisition of their data from bioreactors and other instruments. They use AWS IoT SiteWise monitor portals and Grafana dashboards to visualize this telemetry data in near real-time. These insights help Lyell troubleshoot and resolve issues, as well as make continuous improvements to their cell therapy manufacturing process.

Yara, a global leader in farming solutions, chose AWS as its preferred cloud provider to build Yara’s next-generation Digital Production Platform (DPP). This platform will be the key enabler for Yara to digitalize its production system, consisting of 28 production sites (with a total of 122 production units that feature different production processes like NPK, ammonia, nitric acid, nitrate granulation and carbon dioxide plants) and two mines. The DPP will use AWS IoT SiteWise, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core, and AWS IoT Analytics, to detect, collect, and run sophisticated analytics on production data linked to productivity, reliability, environment, safety, quality and innovation. By applying AWS analytics and machine learning services, such as Amazon SageMaker to the data, Yara can predict product quality and composition, improve balancing of the site utilities, and detect when machines need repair or maintenance to keep production at optimal efficiency levels.

Delivering business outcomes through Partners

AWS Partners also obsess over our customers’ feedback and have developed solutions that give customers access to more options in data ingestion, advanced analytics, and turn-key industrial IoT applications. A few example partner solutions that extend or build upon AWS IoT SiteWise are highlighted below.

Seeq enables engineers and data scientists in process manufacturing organizations to rapidly analyze, predict, collaborate, and share insights to improve production outcomes. Seeq customers rely on Seeq for a reliable connection to their process data and tools that will accelerate analytics to drive faster, data-based decisions. With the addition of the AWS IoT SiteWise connector, Seeq customers can now access data stored in AWS IoT SiteWise, including real-time and historical process data, and contextual data from business systems, and use Seeq applications to cleanse, contextualize, and investigate it to diagnose issues and share them across their organizations.

Seeq tools like Reference Profile and Value Search can be used to generate statistical limits using process data from AWS IoT SiteWise. These statistical limits can be monitored in near real time to ensure that production processes operate with low amounts of variability.

TensorIoT offers SmartInsights, a shop floor-to-insights solution powering the next wave of industrial process optimization. SmartInsights leverages AWS IoT SiteWise, AWS IoT Greengrass and AWS IoT Core to help customers rapidly connect their industrial machinery and sensors to the cloud. SmartInsights is an example of a turnkey solution built on AWS IoT SiteWise for process optimization use cases. It is deployed at companies spanning a variety of industries such as metal fabricators, chemical refineries, industrial machine makers, and automotive parts manufacturers. These customers are using SmartInsights to increase situational awareness, gain actionable insight, and make more confident decisions for use cases such as operational efficiency, predictive maintenance, process optimization, and anomaly detection.

Element Analytics allows Industrial Enterprises to enrich siloed IT/OT data with context metadata to help industrial organizations achieve cleaner, safer, healthier, and more profitable operations. Element Unify enables condition-based monitoring and improved decision-making through context-enriched plant data for real-time KPIs and metrics, with features like cross-application data modeling, no-code transformations for building data pipelines, and automated P&ID bulk text extraction. The Element Unify integration with AWS IoT SiteWise is designed to allow engineers and operators to monitor operations across facilities, quickly compute performance metrics, create applications that analyze industrial equipment data to prevent costly equipment issues, and reduce gaps in production. With Element Unify, AWS IoT SiteWise customers can centralize plant data model integration and metadata management, blending context from sources like OSIsoft PI System (now AVEVA), Asset Framework, Historians, SCADA, SAP PM or Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs) to address industrial use cases like condition monitoring, predictive analytics and maintenance, and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).

Element Unify integration with AWS IoT SiteWise enables drag and drop pipeline building with ability to incorporate multiple sources, and easily publish models to AWS IoT SiteWise and keeping them “evergreen.”

Embassy of Things (EOT) is helping energy companies, to discover and realize enterprise-wide cost reductions with Twin Talk, a secure and scalable ETL++ Software System designed to extract near real-time operational time series data from SCADA systems and siloed legacy historians and delivering it natively into AWS IoT SiteWise. EOT TwinTalk solutions make it easy to ingest industrial data to AWS IoT SiteWise. With data in AWS IoT SiteWise, customers can run queries, analytics, machine learning, reports, and dashboards spanning across all assets of an enterprise which is an important step towards self-optimizing industrial plants.

To provide more options to ingest data into the cloud, we also have partners who build sensor solutions and use AWS IoT SiteWise to collect, store and process data securely and at scale.

Rigado, deployed in more than 20,000 locations across 75 countries, connects over 6 million devices deployed over 100K sensor network systems for Enterprise IoT solutions for use cases including smart office and buildings, connected retail, and intelligent logistics. The Rigado Allegro Kit delivers a plug-and-play sensor network with sensors & devices pre-integrated with AWS IoT SiteWise, allowing solution providers to build a variety of use cases including 1/ Temperature, humidity, and air quality monitoring for refrigerators, freezers, and open areas, 2/ People counting and occupancy in restrooms, elevators, and common areas, and 3/ Employee and asset monitoring with badge and asset tag location.

Shoreline IoT is accelerating digital transformation by automating asset management and making it very affordable and infinitely scalable across all assets, especially ones that are not yet connected or are remote and unattended. The fully automated AI/ML solution is built using AWS IoT services, including AWS IoT SiteWise, and deployed at large enterprise customers for remote compressors, engines, pumps, turbines and other dynamic machines in Oil & Gas Midstream, Pulp and Paper, steel mills, chemicals and water & wastewater, food processing and Manufacturing. The solution features smart, wireless AI sensors with a 5-year battery life to replace manual inspections, and designed for non-experts to deliver 24/7 asset health monitoring through edge and cloud based predictive analytics that reduce downtime, cut maintenance costs, increase equipment efficiency, extend the life of expensive assets and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Urban.io is using AWS IoT SiteWise and AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor to rapidly visualize real time data. Through a combination of wireless retrofit sensors, enterprise class IoT data aggregation and a drag and drop real time dashboard editor, Urban.io is able to deliver on the promise of acquiring customer field data from multiple points in the world and aggregating that to a “single pane of glass” in less than 24 hours. Each device can be installed and commissioned in less than five minutes and then Urban.io’s clients drag the data out and lay it onto dashboards themselves.

AWS partners are building scalable industrial solutions using AWS IoT SiteWise to serve large industrial operations across many sites and countries.

Hitachi Vantara, the digital infrastructure and solutions subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., offers Lumada industrial solutions on the AWS cloud platform to enable customers to accelerate their Industry 4.0 journey. Hitachi offers a highly scalable and agile deployment of Lumada Manufacturing Insights solution integrated with AWS IoT SiteWise. Hitachi’s Lumada complements AWS IoT SiteWise with sophisticated data analytics for customers in manufacturing, transportation and energy that manage industrial operations such as plant floors, power networks, train systems and mining sites.

Rackspace Technology — The first step industrial customers take in their digital transformation journey is to liberate data generated by their disparate factory floor assets to gain actionable insights. Rackspace Technology selected AWS IoT SiteWise for their Rackspace IIoT Smart Factory Accelerator, which provides the following right out-of-the-box: industrial protocol connectors to collect data, mechanisms to transform and enrich the data, quick data visualization through a dashboard, and simplified configuration of alarms and notifications for continuous asset monitoring. AWS IoT SiteWise’s robust feature set allows Rackspace to accelerate their customers’ digital transformation journey by spending more time focusing on their key Manufacturing Performance Indicators, metrics, and business outcomes.

Conclusion

In the past year, we’ve worked hard to launch many important enhancements to AWS IoT SiteWise to help our customers and partners achieve their business goals. With these new features, equipment operators can be notified about key issues and respond quickly with alarms and alerts delivered to them when equipment behaves anomalously or operates outside of expected operating limits. We recently launched AWS IoT SiteWise Edge with launch partners (Cognizant, Atos, Reply, Synadia, CloudRail, TensorIoT, LTI, DT4o). Now, customers are able to optimize bandwidth usage with data processing at the edge and they have low latency, uninterrupted monitoring, visualization and analytics even during times of intermittent cloud connectivity. Through the native support of protocols (OPC UA, Modbus TCP and EtherNet/IP) and features like deadbanding, we’ve opened up more options and flexibility to ingest data. This feature set and flexibility are extended by a multitude of partner solutions to achieve desired business outcomes.

We look forward to another year of listening intently, innovating, and evolving AWS IoT SiteWise to meet your needs and help you achieve goals with confidence.

“We have great customers that have big business objectives to meet. They challenge us every day to peek around corners and invent more of the tools they need to digitally transform their systems and processes. We love building with our customers and partners to solve these real world problems every day,” says Cherie Wong, GM of AWS Industrial IoT Services including AWS IoT SiteWise.

We always welcome feedback about what to build next – get in touch with our team to let us know what you’d like to see us build, or to learn how to get started with AWS IoT Solutions for the connected factory.

About the Authors

Prabal Acharyya

Prabal is the Global Head of IoT Partners for Energy at AWS. He brings over 30 years of experience as an energy industry thought leader to help AWS partners to deliver innovative products & solutions for Energy customers. Prabal is an accomplished entrepreneur and passionate about helping customers achieve their digital transformation goals with application of edge, IoT, AI, Cloud and Digital Twin initiatives. Prabal started his career in the energy industry with BP, where he led a team of solution architects to define and develop scalable solutions for BP’s global upstream and downstream businesses.

Julie Zhao

Julie is a Senior Product Manager on AWS IoT SiteWise. She recently joined AWS and brings three years of startup experience leading products in Industrial IoT. Prior to startups, she spent over 10 years in networking with Cisco and Juniper across engineering and product. She is passionate about building products in Industrial IoT.

Phani Meduri

Phani leads the product team for AWS IoT SiteWise. He is passionate about Industrial IoT and AI and helping customers extract value from their industrial data. His background is in building and simulating industrial equipment in the renewable industry. At Amazon, Phani worked in multiple product management and engineering roles spanning Amazon Retail, Amazon Alexa, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).