Manufacturing innovative, connected, and smart products require a Smart Factory. Creating custom products in small lot sizes requires manufacturing facilities that are as configurable as the products they produce along with intelligence on the shop floor. In addition to this, manufacturing operations within the factory and across the extended enterprise need to be connected and smart.
Cloud plays a critical role to connect technologies across the manufacturing domain. Today, industrial IoT specialists provide standard modules with sensors, communication, and computing to make machines smarter. In the last few years, next-generation factories that can provide smart manufacturing facilities have gained traction among manufacturers. These factories provide a range of positive impacts, including but not limited to enhanced quality, improved safety, lower costs, asset efficiency, and sustainability. All in all, Cloud lies at the core of digital transformation in the manufacturing domain.
The Value Proposition of Azure for the Manufacturing Domain
Microsoft Azure provides a range of services and platforms for the ever-evolving manufacturing domain. In fact, a reference architecture and open data model framework for community members is offered by the Microsoft Azure Industrial IoT cloud platform.
The Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) offers a single open platform architecture that standardises data models for efficient data correlation and liberates data from legacy industrial assets. If this is not all, OMP enables manufacturers to share their data with ecosystem partners in a secure and controlled way, so that others can benefit from their insights. In today's new normal era, community members can work in collaboration to address common industrial challenges, while maintaining ownership over their own data, thanks to pre-built industrial use cases and reference designs.
In addition to these advantages, Azure also provides support and services in the following areas:
Industrial IoT: Industrial IoT gathers, analyses, and acts on data from devices and sensors to anticipate and mitigate complications, guide the design of future products, and maximise efficiency and quality. It leverages Azure Compute, mobile, Machine Learning, and Azure Edge computing to remotely monitor and optimise logistics, manufacturing, and other operations.
Connected Factory: Connected Factories make use of sensors and inexpensive Azure-based storage and analytics (Power BI and Machine Learning) to analyse real-time and historical data from manufacturing processes and devices. This helps in accessing detailed and timely intelligence into efficiency and productivity, ranging from the status of production machines, inventory levels, to yield levels at the manufacturing facilities.
Connected field service: Connected Field Service (CFS) is leveraged to seamlessly integrate IoT data with a field service delivery system. The primary purpose of this is to offer real-time, proactive information to service professionals and technicians about field assets (delivered via the cloud on mobile devices). Azure IoT and Dynamics CRM work together to achieve this.
C.I.G Consultants' Solutions for the Manufacturing Domain
C.I.G Consultants offers a wide range of solutions and services for the manufacturing domain. Our customers have already implemented these out-of-the-box solutions and services for different purposes. They can be leveraged to track their assets (equipment, containers, shipments, etc.), determine the fill level of the containers, explore global and zonal analytics-based insights, enable social distancing in retail stores, visualise assets for simulations and advanced analytics, leverage anomaly detection and statistical models, generate predictive alerts, create incidents on detecting anomalies in the assets, etc.
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