As a companion to my Amazon Web Services (AWS) product release post, several company spokespeople have discussed their applications of the new AWS predictive maintenance and quality products.
“Industrial and manufacturing customers are constantly under pressure from their shareholders, customers, governments, and competitors to reduce costs, improve quality, and maintain compliance. These organizations would like to use the cloud and machine learning to help them automate processes and augment human capabilities across their operations, but building these systems can be error prone, complex, time consuming, and expensive,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS. “We’re excited to bring customers five new machine learning services purpose-built for industrial use that are easy to install, deploy, and get up and running quickly and that connect the cloud to the edge to help deliver the smart factories of the future for our industrial customers.”
Fender Musical Instruments Corporation is an iconic brand and the world’s foremost manufacturer of guitars, basses, amplifiers, and related equipment. “Over the past year we worked with AWS to help develop the critical but sometimes overlooked part of running a successful manufacturing business, knowing your equipment condition. For manufacturers worldwide, maintaining equipment uptime is the only way to remain competitive in a global market. Unplanned downtime is costly both in loss of production and labor due to the fire-fighting nature of breakdowns,” said Bill Holmes, Global Director of Facilities at Fender. “Amazon Monitron can give both large industry manufacturers as well as small ‘mom and pop shops’ the ability to predict equipment failures, giving us the opportunity to preemptively schedule equipment repairs.”
RS Components is a leading player in the industrial components and predictive maintenance space. “We are constantly trying to innovate how we serve the maintenance needs of our customers. With the emergence of IoT, we have seen our customers looking to bring real-time condition monitoring capabilities into the factory environment to reduce reactive maintenance and improve asset reliability,” said Richard Jeffers, Technical Director at RS Components. “We are excited to be working with AWS to bring Amazon Monitron to our customers because it allows them to deploy a cost effective, easy to use, continuously improving condition monitoring solution and enable predictive maintenance across a broader set of equipment in their asset base. Although we stock over 500,000 products from 2,500 different suppliers, this is the first end-to-end wireless vibration and temperature condition monitoring solution in our portfolio. We plan to make Amazon Monitron available to our customers via our e-commerce platform, and leverage it to deliver condition-based monitoring and reliability services through RS Monition, our data led, reliability services business. Working with AWS will enable us to support our customers’ efforts to adopt IoT and machine learning as emerging technologies and accelerate their Industry 4.0 strategies.”
GS EPS is a South Korean Industrial Conglomerate. “We have been generating data across our assets for over a decade now but have only been using physics and rules based methods to gain insights into our data,” said Kang Bum Lee, Executive Vice President of GS EPS. “Amazon Lookout for Equipment is enabling our plant operation teams to build models on our equipment with no ML expertise required. We are leading the transformation of our organization into a data-driven work culture with AWS and Amazon Lookout for Equipment.”
Doosan Infracore is a leading global manufacturer of heavy duty equipment and engines. “Leveraging AI is critical in advancing Doosan’s next generation equipment, so we are working with AWS to develop use cases where automated and scalable machine learning could be leveraged,” said Mr. Jae Yeon Cho, Vice President of Doosan Infracore. “Based on this, we are excited to continue to work with AWS to leverage Amazon Lookout for Equipment in our next generation IoT platform.”
OSIsoft is a manufacturer of application software for real-time data management, called the PI System. “Today, there are more than 2 billion sensor-based data streams inside OSIsoft PI Systems, and thousands of customers relying on the PI System daily to run their operations. These customers are constantly looking for methods to easily serve up insights for improving their competitiveness. OSIsoft products can be integrated with AWS services to help customers unlock additional value from their data. Amazon Lookout for Equipment expands the scope of services and insights available to customers by delivering automated machine learning built specifically for equipment monitoring,” said Michael Graves, Director of Strategic Alliances at OSIsoft.
“Every month, millions of trucks enter Amazon facilities so creating technology that automates trailer loading, unloading, and parking is incredibly important,” said Steve Armato, VP Middle Mile Production Technology at Amazon.com. “Amazon’s Middle Mile Products & Technology (MMPT) has begun using AWS Panorama to recognize license plates on these vehicles and automatically expedite entry and exit for drivers. This enables safe and fast visits to Amazon sites, ensuring faster package delivery for our customers.”
BP is a global energy company, providing customers with fuel for transport, energy for heat and light, lubricants to keep engines moving, and the petrochemicals products used to make everyday items as diverse as paints, clothes, and packaging. The organization has 18,000 service stations and more than 74,000 employees worldwide. “Our engineering teams here at bpx are working very closely with AWS to build an IoT and cloud platform that will enable us to continuously improve the efficiency of our operations,” said Grant Matthews, Chief Technology Officer at BP America. “One of the areas we have explored as part of this effort is the use of computer vision to help us further improve security and worker safety. We want to leverage computer vision to automate the entry and exit of trucks to our facility and verify that they have fulfilled the correct order. Additionally, we see possibilities for computer vision to keep our workers safe in a number of ways, from monitoring social distancing, to setting up dynamic exclusion zones, and detecting oil leaks. AWS Panorama offers an innovative approach to delivering all of these solutions on a single hardware platform with an intuitive user experience. Our teams are excited to work with AWS on this new technology and expect it to help us address many new use cases.”
Siemens Mobility offers intelligent and efficient mobility solutions for urban, interurban, and freight transportation. “Siemens Mobility has been a leader for seamless, sustainable, and secure transport solutions for more than 160 years. The Siemens ITS Digital Lab is the innovation team in charge of bringing the latest digital advances to the traffic industry and uniquely positioned to provide data analytics and AI solutions to public agencies,” said Laura Sanchez, Innovation Manager, Siemens Mobility ITS Digital Lab. “As cities face new challenges, municipalities have turned to us to innovate on their behalf. Cities would like to understand how to effectively manage their assets and improve congestion and direct traffic. We want to use AWS Panorama to bring computer vision to existing security cameras to monitor traffic and intelligently allocate curbside space, help cities optimize parking and traffic, and improve quality of life for their constituents.”
ADLINK Technology offers hardware/software platforms enabling customers to implement edge AI solutions for real-time delivery of actionable data in industrial markets such as manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy, and communications. “The integration of AWS Panorama on ADLINK’s industrial vision systems makes for truly plug-and-play computer vision at the edge,” said Elizabeth Campbell, CEO at ADLINK USA. “In 2021, we will be making AWS Panorama-certified ADLINK NEON cameras powered by NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier available to customers to drive high-quality computer vision powered outcomes much, much faster. This allows ADLINK to deliver ML digital experiments and time to value for our customers more rapidly across logistics, manufacturing, energy, and utilities use cases.”
INDUS.AI is the world’s most advanced construction intelligence solution that enables real estate investors, owners, developers, and general contractors to have real-time visibility and actionable insights into all activities, productivity, and risks at their construction sites. INDUS.AI seeks to make construction sites and projects safer, more efficient, and completely transparent. “Construction zones are dynamic environments. At any given time you’ve got hundreds of deliveries and subcontractors sharing the site with heavy equipment and it’s changing every day. INDUS.AI is focused on delivering construction intelligence for general contractors,” said Matt Man, CEO of INDUS.AI. “Computer vision is an especially valuable tool for this because of its ability to handle multiple tasks at once. We are looking forward to delivering real-time insights on job-site management and safety in a SaaS-like experience for AWS Panorama customers.”
Dafgards is a household name in Sweden, manufacturing a broad assortment of foods. One of their most successful brands is Billys Pan Pizza, a microwaveable pizza baked and packed at a speed of 2 pizzas per second. “To uphold our brand and deliver the freshest and tastiest customer experience, we want to ensure that all our pizzas are adequately covered in cheese and with the correct toppings. Previously, we installed a machine vision system to detect proper coverage of cheese across a pizza’s surface. While this system served well for our original inspection requirement, it was unable to detect defects on new product types that include multiple toppings,” said Fredrik Dafgård, Head of Operational Excellence and Industrial IoT at Dafgards. “Amazon Lookout for Vision automates and scales inspection of diverse product types such as a cheese pizza with vegetables. We successfully expanded our quality assurance for new product types with minimal impact to operations.”
GE Healthcare is a leading global medical technology and digital solutions innovator that develops, manufactures, and distributes diagnostic imaging agents, radiopharmaceuticals, medical diagnostic equipment, including CT and MRI machines, and intelligent devices supported by its Edison intelligence platform. “Today, we use human inspection to verify the quality of our medical equipment. To uphold our brand and deliver best-in-class products trusted by healthcare professionals, we’re excited about the possibility of using Amazon Lookout for Vision to programmatically improve the speed, consistency, and accuracy of detecting product defects across our factories in Japan and potentially in other plants globally in the near future,” said Kozaburo Fujimoto, Operating Officer, General Manager, Manufacturing Division, Plant Manager at GE Healthcare Japan.
Nukon, a SAGE Group company, is a digital transformation consultancy and delivery company that delivers custom-designed solutions which combine strategy, analysis, and technology to give visibility into key business processes so they can be optimized. “We are excited about how Amazon Lookout for Vision will help us detect product defects in real-time within the manufacturing facility for our sister company, SAGE Automation, in line with their stringent quality control program. We are excited to now apply this technology to other manufacturers and integrate it into their quality systems,” said Rafael Amaral, Chief Technology Officer at Nukon.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks