Industry 4.0 Hybrid Cloud (Ferrolux Manufacturing)Cloud & Infrastructure
The effort vastly improved the company’s plant monitoring and maintenance functions; they knew that in order to succeed in this era of Industry 4.0 their infrastructure needed to be much more connected than what it was. They turned to ALETERIS to build a unified hybrid cloud platform.
challenge
The biggest challenge was that Ferrolux Manufacturing was not utilizing its plant data properly. Too much of the sensor and machine data was still trapped on local, disconnected systems inside each factory, which meant that issues took a long time to be noticed and then to be analyzed. Live cross-plant visibility was also not available and decisions could only be made after a shift had already ended. This was holding Ferrolux back; they knew they could protect more of their output if they had the ability to see every plant’s performance in real time. The work addressed three critical issues for Ferrolux Manufacturing:
Improve sensor data collection and plant connectivity:
The teams focused their efforts on a few of the highest-value connectivity levers in order to review the current plant infrastructure, identify gaps in the network architecture and analytically understand latency and bandwidth variability across sites.
Determine the right hybrid cloud architecture:
With twelve plants running different legacy systems, Ferrolux needed a proper method to unify on-premise equipment with cloud-based monitoring. Using a phased connectivity assessment, the teams defined appropriate architecture for each plant by mapping actual versus required data throughput on the most critical production lines.
Optimize the network for perfect real-time monitoring:
The diagnostic determined the stressors that affected visibility and response time. The teams focused on resolving issues related to higher-than-normal data silos and reporting lag, which stressed the entire operations team and led to delays in catching equipment issues.
solution
The solution ALETERIS came up with combined cutting-edge hybrid cloud architecture with real-world factory-floor practicality. Everyone knew that the plants had to be connected, the real challenge was doing it without disrupting active production lines in a negative way. The solution was to introduce a hybrid cloud platform linking on-premise edge devices to a centralized monitoring layer, while providing plant managers with live dashboards across all twelve sites.
This allowed plant managers to be involved in proactive maintenance decisions instead of reacting to equipment failures after they happened.
results
Ferrolux Manufacturing plant managers are now more empowered; Ferrolux also has the benefit of monitoring every plant instantaneously whenever needed. They can now make maintenance and production decisions on the fly based on the latest real-time data.
The effort vastly improved the company’s monitoring and maintenance functions, created and implemented a new hybrid cloud architecture that connected every plant’s edge devices to a central platform, streamlined the incident response process and reduced unplanned downtime across the network.
By the numbers, the effort:
Enabled real-time monitoring across 12 plants
Decreased incident response time by 50%
Lowered the risk of unplanned downtime by 95%
Increased cross-plant data visibility by 10x
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