Deloitte yesterday announced the launch of Smart Factory Fabric, a pre-configured suite of cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) applications designed to accelerate smart factory transformations for companies with manufacturing operations.
Powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT, Deloitte designed and built a suite of cloud applications and integrated services to deliver smart factory capabilities to industrial enterprises. The Smart Factory Fabric suite of services helps companies improve their operational performance and reduce costs by increasing visibility, optimising production, improving quality, and minimising unplanned downtime associated with running a smart factory.
Getting smart factories off the ground
"For companies with complex manufacturing operations, implementing a smart factory solution at industrial scale can be daunting, but imperative for those who wish to remain competitive today. That's why we've worked with AWS on a smart factory offering," said Andy Daecher, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and Deloitte Digital IoT U.S. practice lead.
He added that the Smart Factory Fabric pairs Deloitte's experience in business strategy, operations, industrial products, and technology engineering with AWS cloud and IoT services, including its global reach, to deliver a scalable, configurable smart factory that's tailored to a manufacturer's unique needs.
Smart Factory Fabric is designed for companies with manufacturing operations; sample industry sectors include: aerospace and defense; industrial products; pharmaceutical and medical devices; automotive; government; high tech; oil, gas and chemicals; and power and utilities.
"Services like AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Analytics, and AWS IoT Events are designed to offer increased machine connectivity, real-time streaming data ingestion, and analytics to drive automation throughout the shop floor. This will advance manufacturing operations and fulfill a vision of a truly integrated, digital smart factory," said Dirk Didascalou, vice president, AWS IoT, Amazon Web Services. "We are delighted to be working with Deloitte to focus on optimizing our customers' factory operations and the infrastructure needed to make it happen."
Smart Factory Fabric capabilities and potential benefits include:
- Real-time optimization of shop floor performance: Allows operators to identify overall equipment effectiveness that quantifies the availability, performance, quality and location of each asset and production line. It also realizes better machine utilization; and optimizes production capacity, utilization, and scheduling.
- Visibility and analytics across a network of factory operations: Rapidly connecting devices enables the collection of streaming, transactional and machine status data onto AWS. It also provides the ability to create common asset and process models. Machine health monitoring and trending allows a shift from calendar to condition based and predictive maintenance; consistent factory, asset and line performance analysis across plants activates opportunities for optimization.
- Dynamic workforce management: Enables the scheduling of shop floor resources based on machine, inventory, and labor constraints. It also provides visibility into real-time inventory and tools/asset positions and workforce status; delivers dynamic crew planning and work allocation including risk-based (stochastic) materials requirement planning (MRP), predictive line-of-business (LOB) management, risk-adjusted span and lead time management.
- Efficient technology navigation and implementation: Pre-built persona-based screens and dashboards for operators, process managers, engineering managers, quality coaches, plant supervisors, and manufacturing executives allows for rapid configuration and deployment of smart factory capabilities designed to provide the right level of detail at the right time to enable critical decision making.
- Scalable AWS IoT platform enabling global edge to cloud deployments: AWS IoT services reside in multiple AWS Regions for global scale to help customers acquire, process, and consume data easily and securely. AWS IoT edge services such as AWS IoT Greengrass and AWS IoT SiteWise help collect, filter, and aggregate real-time streaming and transactional data from tens of thousands of devices and push it to the cloud for storage and advanced analytics. Also, AWS IoT Events makes it easy for industrial, consumer, and commercial customers to detect and respond to events from many different IoT sensors and applications.
Early adopter
Deloitte worked with AWS to help Spirit AeroSystems, a large aerostructures manufacturer, improve visibility into the parts moving through their production line. By combining industrial IoT (IIoT) technology, for real-time inventory, work in process (WIP) status, and machine performance data, with ERP data and supplier inventory data in the cloud, Deloitte used AWS to apply advanced algorithms to dynamically schedule the production facility and automated material movement — improving Spirit AeroSystems' overall factory performance.
"At Spirit AeroSystems, we are always looking for and developing ways to make our manufacturing operations more efficient, so we can focus on delivering the most innovative aerostructures to some of the world's largest commercial and defense OEMs," said Terry George, Spirit Aerostructures vice president of Advanced Manufacturing Strategy. "In collaboration with Deloitte and AWS, we're working to quickly implement smart factory solutions into our manufacturing operations that will lead to an increase in production throughput, asset utilisation, while reducing inventory."
