AWS Connected Factory Offering

Background

The biggest challenge within the plant floor for a majority of manufacturers is visibility into operational technology data from machines, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems for performing root cause analysis (RCA) when a line or a machine goes down, improving throughput without compromising quality, and understanding micro-stoppages of machinery in real time.

A plant floor has a disparate set of PLCs and multiple industrial protocols (300+) which make it challenging to talk to the plant floor "Things" and access data which can be leveraged for diagnostics and predictive analytics. In addition, most customers and partners spend excessive time building connectivity to these plant floor systems. This approach is unscalable due to the multiple integration points. Customers and partners have to build additional technology components to scale this for multi-plant roll-out, to address security, and to generate multiple views of the data. Due to a lack of device integration and data visibility, manufacturers struggle to drive business outcomes and industry 4.0 initiatives never leave the Proof of Concept stage.

Industrial Machine Connectivity Solution

Version: 1.0
Last updated: 4/2021
Author: AWS

View the Industrial Machine Connectivity Quickstart

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Overview

The Industrial Machine Connectivity (IMC) Solution is a purpose-built offering from AWS and partners to unlock data from equipment, such as PLCs and Historians, to optimize operations, improve productivity, and availability.

Industrial machine connectivity framework with AWS qualified hardware and AWS IoT device software for ingesting, streaming data from equipment, and historical data from historian to cloud.
Deployment expertise for rapid roll out with a fixed menu of features providing immediate outcomes and a solid foundation for Digital Innovation with AWS sharing the implementation risk at a fixed price.
Partner solutions that optimize factory output, product quality, maximize asset utilization, and identify equipment maintenance issues.

Use case

The IMC Solution was designed to help manufacturers modernize their operations. Customers do not have to invest significantly in data collection that is considered undifferentiated heavy lifting. Second, customers are able to collect, organize, and store their industrial data in AWS in an operational data store for hot data and an industrial date lake for warm/cold data, as well as define virtual assets and asset hierarchies to provide structure and context to the data. Third, with this streamlined data collection process, customers are able to recognize immediate business value though visualization of their operational metrics from all sources of data. Fourth, they receive a deployment framework to be able to roll out the offering across all their factory lines and plants. Lastly with this data organized in AWS, customers can accelerate their industry 4.0 journey and achieve business outcomes like predictive maintenance, predictive quality, and remote asset management.

Solution Details

The IMC Solution is designed to support your Industry 4.0 success and includes:

Industrial Machine Connectivity Architecture - With the technical framework to ensure repeatability, the offering is a complete, production-ready solution, scalable across multiple plants in a customer’s organization.
Industrial Machine Connectivity Framework – Extract, expose, and visualize locked data with a leading industrial protocol-compatable solution with connectivity to collect, store, and process industrial data. Customers can create virtual assets (plant, line, machine, component, process) and visualizate data in near real-time.
Deployment Expertise (AWS Professional Services and Partners) – Accelerate your Industry 4.0 journey, while aligning to business goals and outcomes. Customers can deploy production ready connected factory solutions in one plant and then quickly repeat for rapid deployment of remaining plants at scale.
AWS Partner Solutions – Gain operational insights for business outcomes with AWS Partner Solutions. Customers can deploy solutions for a wide range of use-cases to improve product quality, lower energy costs, optimize factory output, identify equipment issues, and more.

Benefits

Organize, store, and manage data – Get data from valuable assets to AWS in a simple, structured process so that you can quickly realize the business value that is derived from that data.
Visualize near real-time operational metrics – Visibility into operation technology data to perform Root Cause Analysis (RCA) when a line or a machine goes down, improve through put without compromising quality, understanding more around micro-stoppages of machinery in real time.
Foundation for higher level solutions – This provides a scalable foundation to deploy solutions for use-cases like predictive quality and predictive maintenance.
Deployment expertise – Rapid deployment at scale with a fixed menu of features providing immediate outcomes and a solid foundation for Digital Innovation with AWS sharing the implementation risk at a fixed price.
Accelerate business outcomes – Advanced partner solutions that increase asset availability, increase product quality, increase knowledge of assets, lower costs, reduce maintenance costs and more.