Brompton Bicycle Gears Up Production by 20% with RS Industria and AWS

A critical component of the assembly line in Brompton’s Greenford factory, the six-axis computer numerical control (CNC) machine—was the source of a production bottleneck. This machine is essential to building the bike’s folding frame to deliver on the brand’s unique selling proposition. Underperformance of the CNC machine due to long cycle times, coupled with a lack of visibility into impending asset failures, led to large chunks of unforeseen downtime and adversely affected production capacity.

To enable pre-emptive action and capacity planning on the shop floor, Brompton required visibility into the machine’s functioning, including issues that could cause machine failure. For that, Brompton needed a way to continuously monitor the machine’s performance.

Having identified the need for continuous monitoring, Brompton turned to AWS Partner, RS Industria, for a solution. RS Industria had access to real-time monitoring data for the CNC machine. By analyzing that historical data from the previous solution, Brompton was able to set automatic shutdowns based on maximum torque values for each servo motor in the CNC machine.

The new solution by RS Industria captures real-time machinery telemetry from edge devices in Brompton’s connected factories using AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Greengrass. The data is then ingested into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and an Amazon Timestream timeseries database, where AWS Lambda functions are triggered to process and store this data. The solution also automatically builds dashboards from the sensor data so that Brompton can view its production line data, such as availability or energy usage. RS Industria’s analytics toolkit—Data Studio, also built using services from Amazon Web Services (AWS)—then delivers key actionable insights to enable timely intervention on the shop floor. Acting on these insights helps the Brompton team prevent major machine outages and provides valuable data to support fault-finding, diagnostics, and resolution.

RS Industria’s data platform has eliminated the need to test several machine parts individually, to ensure their proper functioning. This has led to several gains at the Brompton factory. Malcolm Millar, manufacturing engineer at Brompton, explained, “I have been using RS Industria to develop tooling speeds and feeds. Working with RS Industria has improved cycle times and freed up engineering time that’s better spent on other activities.”

Additionally, early warnings on machine failures and real-time insights on machine performance have contributed to reducing CNC machine downtime by 33% at the Brompton factory. The process is now smoother for engineers and people on the shop floor, and the solution has saved Brompton over ₤40,000 on parts and labor annually.

Possibly the biggest benefit of this exercise has been an increase in the factory’s manufacturing potential. With Brompton’s annual bike production capacity now up by 20,000 bikes thanks to RS Industria, it is improving access to portable bikes around the world. As Millar said, “In keeping with the emphasis on innovation at the heart of Brompton, we’re set to embrace the future of production thanks to the forward-looking manufacturing solutions offered by RS Industria and AWS.”