by Gary Mintchell | Jul 2, 2024 | Data Management, Manufacturing IT, News, Operations Management, Sustainability
- “Spotlight on the Future” Report Highlights How PLM and Digital Thread Solutions Address Key Challenges with Sustainability Data Accuracy, Availability, and Analysis
- Aras Research Finds That Three Out of Four Companies Feel Pressured by Regulation, Customers, Investors, and Employees to Become More Sustainable
Most news invading my email client these days involves companies sending out some questionnaires and compiling a report. This one from PLM and Digital Thread developer Aras called “Spotlight on the Future 2024,” focuses on sustainability.
The report highlights that three out of four companies say they feel pressured by customers, investors, and even their own workforce to operate more sustainably. The research also uncovered a potential reason why in-demand sustainability initiatives are not implemented sooner: a majority of companies reported that in order to do so, they must greatly improve the collection and processing of their data.
“Progress towards greater sustainability is key to continuing economic advancement,” said Roque Martin, CEO of Aras. Whether in the U.S., Europe, or Japan, 90% of companies who took our survey say that management has already recognized that sustainability is an important contributor to future business success.”
The so-called three Rs – reduce, reuse and recycle – already play a central role in the implementation of companies’ sustainability goals. 83% of the companies surveyed said that the lower consumption of raw materials and products is already a high priority. In addition, 70% of companies are already relying on the use of recycled machines, the conversion of existing systems, and the return of materials to the economic cycle. Interestingly, with 84% of companies reducing, 72% reusing, and 70% recycling, industrial companies in the United States are at the front of the pack when compared to other nations’ sustainability efforts.
74% of respondents acknowledge that they are missing data (i.e. from suppliers); 72% of companies said they have poorly prepared data; and 67% admit that they simply lack the ability to properly manage their data.
A throwaway economy is being replaced by a production model based on reuse. However, for the transition from linear resource processing to a circular economy to succeed, companies have to think about and plan their development and production processes differently. To fully take advantage of the green potential, companies must not only collect and analyze their data from the design and manufacturing phase, but also integrate the supply chain.
Aras’ “Spotlight on the Future 2024” study, conducted in December 2023, surveyed 835 executives from Europe, the US, and Japan. Survey participants work in companies with a minimum turnover of 40 million euros in the automotive, aerospace & defense, mechanical engineering, medical technology, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and food industries.
by Gary Mintchell | May 28, 2024 | Data Management, Enterprise IT, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
Seeq is one of a few newish software companies that I am watching while I try to determine the health of the industrial technology infrastructure. Despite that, I was not invited and did not attend their recent user conference. There was one announcement from the conference that looks intriguing. The Seeq platform is seeking (I’m sorry) an enterprise outlook.
Seeq announced the launch of the Seeq Industrial Enterprise Monitoring Suite with the release of Seeq Vantage, the company’s first industrial enterprise monitoring app.
The Seeq Industrial Enterprise Monitoring Suite provides a comprehensive, automated view into operational performance—past and present. This broader view enables better decision making and continuous improvement across today’s complex, industrial ecosystems. The Seeq Industrial Enterprise Monitoring Suite leverages the combined power of the Seeq Industrial Analytics and AI Suite and the context that only teams of experts can provide—all at the scale needed to drive truly impactful results across the operational footprint.
Through the Seeq Vantage app, industrial organizations can tailor, deploy and automate enterprise-level use cases, such as asset and process monitoring, condition-based maintenance, reliability and downtime tracking and more. Coupled with the Seeq Industrial Analytics and AI Suite, customers now have an integrated ecosystem to capture, analyze, aggregate, monitor, triage, investigate, and document insights and actions at the local level and the enterprise level. The app provides proactive and automated enterprise surveillance for daily operational decisions, and comprehensive assembly of operational effectiveness and utilization understanding to prioritize longer-term investment decisions.
by Gary Mintchell | May 17, 2024 | Automation, Cloud, Data Management, Embedded Control, Manufacturing IT, Networking
While at Automate 2024 I saw Travis Cox of Inductive Automation and Benson Hougland of Opto 22. It was tough seeing them since their booth was always packed. I wound up walking through the show and out into the corridor with them.
These two companies plus Cirrus Link (MQTT and Sparkplug) are perhaps the best partnership combination I’ve seen in my years reporting in this market. Ignition running on Opto’s Groov Epic platform with MQTT and Sparkplug as the communications architecture solve many customer problems.
Hougland told me that they are continuing to build out the Groov platform. And to watch for cool things coming.
Cox told me that the big thing to pay attention to right now from Inductive Automation is the integration with Snowflake (more below). He says the integration keeps improving.
Here is Cox describing the integration at the last Ignition Community Conference:
And well, we got all the community to participate, where they’re basically leveraging Ignition or Ignition Edge or potentially have a smart device that speaks MQTT Sparkplug and they’re gonna build a data model, publish that up to a Chariot broker that’s in the cloud. Real simple. Then we can use the IoT bridge for Snowflake by Cirrus Link and all that data from Sparkplug goes directly into the Snowflake database. We’re showing it on a dashboard within Ignition, but it’s going to Snowflake database as well. And we can easily go and query that data. And we went one step further and we’re actually showing the anomaly detection within the Data Dash. So we’ll do a demonstration of this in just a moment, but wanna show you just how easy it is for this solution. And it’s all something we could do right now. It’s very, very simple to get started with this whole thing.
What is Snowflake, you may ask. Here is Pugal Janakiraman from Snowflake speaking at ICC 2024:
Snowflake is a globally connected cloud vendor agnostic data platform. It’s one single managed service from Snowflake. We take care of security, we take care of governance, we take care of scalability. And after that, much more cool, your API of choice is still SQL. You don’t have to learn hundreds of new services. You continue to use SQL as a mechanism to leverage data which is present in Snowflake, whether it is around building dashboards or you want to build an AI and ML model or build inference around those models, you still use SQL as an API for doing that.
Snowflake is a cloud-native database. Data can still reside on-premise or it can reside in whatever is your cloud vendor of choice. You can run analytics without the data movement out there. So we provide that kind of collaboration mechanisms. We provide AI and ML-based analytics. This is how the journey started for us. Ignition on Edge with zero coding using Snowpipe Streaming API, send the data to Snowflake.
by Gary Mintchell | May 13, 2024 | Business, Cloud, Data Management, Generative AI, Manufacturing IT, News
Partnering with Microsoft continues to be an important part of manufacturing software development. This news is from Hexagon partnering with Microsoft to integrate engineering with Microsoft 365 to foster data collaboration among engineers. There’s a lot of marketing overkill in the release, but the essence is they hope to improve innovation through engineers and designers using improved collaboration tools.
- Hexagon has contributed significantly to the open-source Fluid Framework data architecture that connects any manufacturing system and will integrate with Microsoft 365 creating agile, simplified workflows and productive collaboration using engineering and productivity software
- Hexagon will roll-out applications that integrate the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to empower experienced employees to be more productive and assist less skilled users
- These innovations form a significant foundation for new real-time co-engineering applications that combine Hexagon’s digital twin technologies with Microsoft Azure
Hexagon and Microsoft have partnered closely on the development and scaling of the open-source Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay service to support the real-time sharing of data across a wide range of manufacturing industry processes and systems, allowing data created in one system to be immediately available to any other person or machine operating in another. Under the new partnership, the Microsoft 365 ecosystem will plug into this data layer, enabling customers to connect their day-to-day office documents and processes with manufacturing tools. This gives teams the freedom to innovate with the tools they already use; for example, tooling cost data from a Microsoft Excel worksheet could be easily shared with a CAM programmer, so simplifying work practices and decision-making between roles.
Microsoft Teams calls can become interactive working sessions, with CAD, simulations or metrology point clouds seamlessly visualised from the source data to allow on-the-spot collaboration and fast, iterative teamwork across disparate engineering and manufacturing functions. Hexagon has already demonstrated this capability in its 3D Whiteboard Nexus tool, which is also now available as an native app in Teams.
Hexagon is working with Microsoft to integrate generative AI models into its manufacturing software, helping users to make better use of their capabilities and analysing existing datasets to learn and suggest the best practices for achieving desired outputs. These AI experiences include contextual advisors, offering expert users productivity-boosting automation while also helping new users to upskill faster and achieve good results with less supervision – a valuable tool as the industry faces a growing skills shortage in many essential roles.
by Gary Mintchell | May 3, 2024 | Data Management, Operations Management
This news must be the third “revolutionizing” release of the week. Every marketer rushes to publicize that their product uses AI. It probably has for a few years, but it is the necessary marketing term of 2024. Aionic Digital’s businesses encompass AI in technology consulting and systems integration for data management, systems integrations, customer engagement, and eCommerce. I’m sure there must be manufacturing and production in there somewhere.
The company has announced release of Synapse, an AI-powered accelerator designed to address and overcome the challenges of systems integrations. Synapse contains proprietary knowledge-base and AI analyzer.
The ideal customer profile for Synapse includes forward-thinking, mid-sized to large corporations intent on maintaining a cutting edge in the competitive landscape. Its AI-driven systems integrations and universal connector capabilities are perfect for all companies that wish to avoid vendor lock-in, or migrate data in or out of systems. Synapse boasts broad application-use across industries that demand rapid, accurate, and flexible systems integration, including, but most certainly not limited to:
- Software as a service (SaaS)
- Retail and eCommerce
- Healthcare
- Logistics
- Quick service restaurants (QSR)
- Manufacturing and machine learning (ML)
- Fintech
- Travel & leisure
- Higher education
“Synapse represents a paradigm shift in data management,” said Yaron Benjamin, CEO, Aionic Digital. “It’s a transformational accelerator designed for companies that need to integrate data across different ERPs or CRMs, to popular booking and ticket engines and eCommerce systems like OMS, PIM, CRM, DAM, CDP, and others. Synapse is the perfect solution for any business, organization, or enterprise that needs data integration across any system, any platform, at any time.”
Key benefits of Synapse include:
- Unprecedented efficiency in database migration with time savings of up to 50-60%
- Flexibility to adapt and integrate a variety of systems with ease
- Significant cost savings through reduced IT resource dependence
- Enhanced competitive advantage through quick adaptability to market changes
- Minimized risk of data loss or errors, safeguarding operational stability
- Scalable solutions to match the growth trajectory of business
- Empowerment of digital transformation initiatives across sectors
by Gary Mintchell | May 2, 2024 | Data Management, Generative AI, Operations Management
Now that ChatGPT has been out for a while, people playing with it have discovered the shortcomings. Today at MIT, Sam Altman acknowledged the shortcomings of GenerativeAI. But that doesn’t stop companies from jumping on the GenAI bandwagon. Yes, they are using it. I’d just suggest doing a test drive or asking a lot of questions to discover just what it can do for you.
This is news from a company using Generative AI for predictive applications. Check it out.
SymphonyAI, a leader in predictive and generative enterprise AI SaaS, announced IRIS (Industrial Reasoning and Insights Service) Foundry, an industrial data operations platform for the rapid creation of robust digital industrial applications that improve process efficiency, reduce unscheduled asset downtime, and enhance connected worker capabilities. IRIS Foundry, powered by SymphonyAI’s award-winning predictive and generative EurekaAI platform, uses AI-enabled data contextualization at enterprise scale and is both open and composable.
IRIS Foundry provides the differentiating building blocks of industrial data management and governance needed to deploy AI-embedded manufacturing solutions at enterprise scale. IRIS Foundry has prebuilt connectors to extract data from IT, OT, and enterprise data sources into polyglot dataops storage to ensure versatile handling and integration of multiple data contexts. Data is organized into a structured asset hierarchy using AI-powered P&ID ingestion or through an existing asset historian framework. This process, enhanced with sophisticated contextualization services, automatically maps data into a unified namespace. The result is a dynamic industrial knowledge graph, simplifying access to and navigation of information. The IRIS Foundry knowledge graph is a foundational layer for enriched analysis and insights, empowering IRIS copilots for user-based interactions and guiding the exploration and understanding of complex data landscapes. Industrial applications built on IRIS Foundry adhere to data governance, audit, and security standards.
IRIS Foundry offers a low-code, drag-and-drop user experience, easy integration with programming tools, and an ability to deploy in various modes ranging from SaaS to customer-hosted models in a private cloud. Built on a lightweight architecture with cloud and edge computing in scope, the install footprint is synergistic with manufacturers’ operational technology (OT), information technology (IT), and external data ecosystems and contains hundreds of prebuilt connectors, reducing the effort to unify industrial data.
