Hitachi Vantara has introduced a suite of AI-flavoured industrial IoT solutions to accelerate digital transformation on the shop floor in manufacturing operations.
The new Lumada Manufacturing Insights package applies “data science rigor to drive continuous improvement” in manufacturing, said Hitachi Vantara. It incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to bring predictive and prescriptive analytics to industrial machines and processes.
The software combines with existing applications without the need to rip-and-replace manufacturing equipment or applications. Brad Surak, chief product and strategy officer at Hitachi Vantara, commented: “For too many manufacturers, legacy infrastructure and disconnected software and processes slow innovation and impact competitive advantage.”
The software, available to run on premises or in the cloud, promises to bring together data and “stranded assets” that has been previously existed in silos, and augment it with new streams from sundry IoT sensors, including video and lidar sensors.
The company listed the gains: to drive ‘4M’ (machine, man, material, methods) correlations for root-cause analysis at scale; to evaluate overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and make enhancement recommendations based on advanced AI and ML; for dynamic scheduling of workloads, rates of production and work-order backlogs; to monitor and guide quality assurance; and to improve demand forecasts.
Ericsson is using Hitachi Vantara’s industrial IoT and AI software in its factories in North America. Shannon Lucas, head of customer unit emerging business for Ericsson North America, said: “Significant short-lead products have to be designed, prototyped and delivered to meet the demands of our customers and partners as we accelerate the product supply for 5G.
“Ericsson and Hitachi Vantara have collaborated to test Lumada Manufacturing Insights to gear up for an anticipated increase in new product introductions, establishing a digital innovation foundation for sustained gains. We are leveraging the same solution that we will take to our joint customers in partnership with Hitachi Vantara, and will further expand IIoT use cases based on our 5G technologies.”
Mike Guilfoyle, director of research at ARC Advisory Group, said: “The big challenge is how to manage the cost, resources and market pressures now and [in the] future. [It] requires a portfolio approach to transformation and a digital innovation foundation that is platform agnostic, secure, and [capable from] edge to multi-cloud. This helps manufacturers accelerate time to value as they grow their digital competency.”
Vijay Kamineni, business transformation leader at Logan Aluminum, said: “Our focus was to accelerate transformative change, eliminate data silos, and build a foundation for digital innovation. The collaboration with Hitachi Vantara enables us to define business goals for each stage of our transformation, with clear outcomes that we believe will accelerate gains in productivity, quality, safety and sustainable manufacturing.”
Shuja Goraya, chief technology officer at Precision Drilling Corporation, said: “Humans and machines working together to deliver the vision of ‘digital drilling’ is driven by our ambition to achieve transformative outcomes – drilling our best wells every time and consistently achieving Target Zero for accidents. We are realising time-to-value with industrial analytics… to process more than 20,000 data streams per second per rig.
“This drives operational excellence and competitive advantage. We’re leveraging insights from video and lidar, [and] integrating it with Lumada to deliver business outcomes. It’s driving process optimisation by identifying improvement opportunities and shortening well delivery times for our customers.”
