RS Components Increases Manufacturing OEE with Tata Consulting Services on AWS

RS Components wanted to implement predictive maintenance for equipment under contract and reduce turnaround time for repairs to ensure their customers could perform at their best. RS Components, collaborating with Tata Consulting Services (TCS), built the RS Industria solution using IoT on AWS to help predict potential failures and enable it to fix the issue. Additionally, the solution alerts the RS Components maintenance team to failures, allowing them to respond quickly to reduce downtime. With the help of TCS and AWS, RS Components increased overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), reduced energy consumption, and improved plant operational efficiency.

RS Components, a part of RS Group, is a leading global distributor of electronics and maintenance products. Customers working with RS Components are involved in designing, building, or maintaining industrial equipment and facilities. The facilities include large warehouses, food manufacturing, and water treatment plants.

RS Components has over one million customers, stocks more than 500,000 industrial and electronic parts, and ships over 50,000 parcels a day. Previously, the success of RS Components relied on the traditional maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) business model. Taking the traditional MRO approach, however, meant that RS Components often had to wait for customers to provide notification of equipment failure before performing maintenance. These customers depend on reliable industrial and electronic parts to keep their facilities, systems, assets, and equipment up and running. A spontaneous breakdown on a production line, for example, negatively impacts production time, which increases costs and labor.

RS Components decided it needed a technologically advanced solution capable of anticipating the needs of customers. It was also important to RS Components that it collaborates with those who understand how to build solutions in a hyper-scale cloud service platform like Amazon Web Services (AWS). RS Components partnered with AWS Partner Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to brainstorm and then develop a solution that would meet the challenges and opportunities of the digital era.

With the expertise and engineering of TCS, RS Components built RS Industria. RS Industria is a cloud-based service that helps customers connect to real-time factory floor data and use powerful analytics to provide alerts about anticipated needs. Using IoT and AWS, it simplifies complex manual intervention for data collection, monitoring, analysis, and alerts. RS Industria is powered by AWS and relies on several AWS services including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS IoT Core, Amazon Cognito, AWS Glue, Amazon QuickSight, and AWS Lambda. TCS enables RS Components to scale quickly and better engage clients via a customer-facing platform.

AI emerged as a clear way to help RS Components accomplish one of its primary goals—to help customers understand and use data to make more informed decisions while meeting customer needs. RS Industria is still in the development phase but is already delivering MRO, energy savings, and getting RS Components closer to its customers.

“This successful collaboration led to an optimization of high value assets, downtime, and a significant increase in OEE,” says Richard Jeffers, director of industrial digital solutions at RS Components. The automation of previous manual processes provided by RS Industria decrease the required to complete processes.

The implementation of RS Industria led to an increase in plant operational efficiency and productivity. Powered by AWS, RS Industria allows RS Components to monitor its customers via a cloud-based service that predicts when parts may need repair or replacement. This real-time knowledge and data-driven insights provides ample time for RS Components to develop contingency options for its customers and supply parts before a breakdown in a system or production line occurs. Subsequently, downtime has been reduced.

The collaboration between RS Components, TCS, and AWS has sustainable impacts, including reducing energy consumption and helping to clean the environment. RS Industria allows RS Components to monitor entire facilities against various parameters in the factory. “Such ongoing monitoring provides us opportunities to evaluate use of energy and identify sustainable ways to save money while also reducing pollutants in water, for example,” adds Jeffers.

The forward thinking and engineering that went into RS Industria are already producing results. Five customers have improved productivity, reduced the resources needed for monitoring an entire plant, and decreased downtime and energy consumption. RS Industria is still in the development phase, and the collaboration will continue until the full product is launched and customers start using it. “The next 12 months for us,” says Jeffers, “is about taking the learning from our original customers and feeding it back into the product and our business processes so that we can start to think about scaling up and really starting to move towards a commercially successful product.”