Dematic Customers Improve Operations Using Seeq on AWS for IIoT Data Insights

Manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution operations can provide efficient flow and operational excellence using intralogistics automation. Dematic implements automated material handling systems to help production and distribution operations boost efficiency and fulfill orders on time, with speed and accuracy. Given the ecommerce pressures triggered by the pandemic, Dematic saw an increasing need among its customers to prevent unplanned machine downtime and optimize asset utilization. Running Seeq on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Dematic can quickly and easily turn huge volumes of customers’ time series machine data into actionable business insights.

Depending on the company, downtime can cost thousands or millions of dollars per hour in lost revenue, productivity, and future contracts for industrial organizations, such as warehouses, DCs, and production facilities. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic further raised the stakes as supply shortages and spikes in online ordering left very little room for error. Under these high-pressure scenarios, many organizations learned that outdated processes and unplanned machine repairs prevented them from meeting customer demand. The time had come to consider how they could use machine sensor data to help them better meet their business goals.

As a trusted systems integrator with years of industrial expertise, Dematic specializes in offering solutions that increase operational excellence of warehouses, DCs, and production facilities. The company saw an opportunity to meet the rise in demand for data-driven insights. It wanted to provide services that made industrial IoT (IIoT) data collected from machine sensors readily consumable for a variety of use cases, like predictive maintenance. To create these offerings, Dematic needed a solution to reduce the complexity of handling large volumes of raw data and to apply advanced analytics technologies to that data, so the team could focus on delivering those insights in a way that would empower their customers.

Running Seeq’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution on AWS, Dematic connects its on-premises data to help customers find valuable insights from their IIoT data and minimize downtime. Seeq applications support the complete lifecycle of advanced analytics unique to process manufacturers. Using Seeq, Dematic can connect to all customer data—on-premises or in the cloud—and perform advanced analytics on the data. This allows Dematic to maintain a single source of truth without having to move or copy customer data while still adhering to data governance policies.

Seeq monitors motor amperage draw, vibration, motor temperatures, and other variables against known set points to detect deviations. Dematic triggers workflows in response to those deviations that align with their customers’ processes. “Seeq cleans up the raw machine data, removes outliers, builds KPIs, and makes it easy for us to apply analytics to create predictions and pull intelligence out of the data,” said Paul Berna, Director of Customer Service Digital for Dematic. “And we don’t need a data scientist on staff, Seeq allows us to run advanced models and analytics with just a few clicks.”

While many C-level decision makers want to use data to improve operations, they struggle with how to get their factory teams onboard. They want to ensure teams have access to real-time insights without having to be proficient with spreadsheets and data analysis. Dematic understands how to translate sensor data into everyday activities teams already complete, such as generating daily work orders. For example, Dematic uses Seeq to build a solution that displays real-time machine health scores and applies color coding to help teams identify the top machines that need inspection. At a glance, maintenance teams know right away which machines to service and adjust. “Dematic can discover and present performance issues to the maintenance teams instead of having them have to do it,” said Paul.

On one hand, companies that don’t use data to predict maintenance may run their equipment until it breaks which leads to more downtime and costly repairs. On the other hand, companies that act overly cautious may replace perfectly good motors and parts because they reach the end of their estimated life, when actual running conditions would have extended the life two or three times what was published. Using Seeq’s advanced analytics applications, Dematic helps customers strike the right balance between optimizing asset utilization and managing downtime. The solutions provide advance warning of equipment issues, so they can plan accordingly.

For Seeq users like Dematic, Seeq SaaS not only helps them get to market fast and control costs, but it also provides a basis for secure, ongoing innovation across the company. As Brian Crandall, Enterprise Sales Executive at Seeq explained: “We wanted to help Dematic create a Center of Excellence for centralized monitoring that’s available to anyone in the company. By hosting the Seeq SaaS offering on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Dematic can use a Seeq Remote Agent to securely connect to the cloud, which is nice from a security standpoint because it doesn’t require a specialized VPN, and ensures low latency.”

Today, Dematic uses Seeq to offer condition-based monitoring and predictive maintenance, but it’s constantly looking at other scenarios to help its customers embrace their digital transformation. “The insights gained from Seeq software helps Dematic customers optimize their operations. In addition, we share our best practices upstream with Dematic R&D; we can take advantage of what we’re learning and apply it to fast-track future innovation”, said Paul Berna.  “We’re always looking at ways to bring new data, like help desk calls or service orders, into the overall analysis for useful insights that our customers can use to maximize automation performance and achieve operational excellence.