Partner Success with AWS / Manufacturing / United Kingdom
Brompton Bicycle Gears Up Production by 20% with RS Industria and AWS
Reduced
downtime of a key asset by 33%
Saved
over ₤40,000 on parts and labor
Boosted
annual production capacity by 20,000 units
Overview
UK-based manufacturer of folding bikes, Brompton Bicycles, manufactures about 100,000 bikes annually. But, it struggled to keep up with the high demand for its iconic product. With its engineers looking for ways to increase manufacturing capacity, Brompton turned to AWS Partner RS Industria to monitor key production assets to clear production bottlenecks. As a result of this smart manufacturing solution, Brompton increased its annual production capacity by 20,000 bikes with minimal capital investment.
CNC Bottleneck Hits the Brakes on Production
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.
Working with RS Industria has improved cycle times and freed up engineering time that’s better spent on other activities.”
Malcolm Millar
Manufacturing Engineer, Brompton Bicycles
Brompton Starts a New Success Cycle with RS Industria
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.
Asset Monitoring Leads to a Chain of Benefits
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.”
About Brompton Bicycles
UK’s largest bicycle manufacturer, known globally for its iconic folding bike, Brompton employs an 800-strong workforce across four continents and manufactures about 100,000 bikes a year.
About AWS Partner RS Industria
RS Industria is an innovative cloud-based service that helps manufacturers rapidly liberate, collect, and analyze data from legacy assets in real-time for improved decision making. It unlocks insights to reduce energy consumption, improve uptime, and increase efficiency in a way that is simple, fast, and affordable. Part of RS Group, a FTSE100 company and leading provider of worldwide omni-channel solutions, RS Industria has over 80 years of experience in delivering component supply services and solutions.
AWS Services Used
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources, making it the fastest way to turn an idea into a modern, production, serverless applications.
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Amazon Timestream
Amazon Timestream offers fully managed, purpose-built time-series database engines for workloads from low-latency queries to large-scale data ingestion.
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AWS IoT Core
AWS IoT Core lets you connect billions of IoT devices and route trillions of messages to AWS services without managing infrastructure.
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