The next evolution of Industrie 4.0 is here today: Accelerating intelligence in the new digital era
I was pleased to recently spend time with our customers and partners in France at Microsoft’s 3rd annual Manufacturing & Resources Symposium. We welcomed more than 100 executives from all lines of business who were interested in hearing from their peers, Microsoft, and our partners about the latest digital transformation trends.
It is interesting to see how the market has advanced in just the last year alone. As IoT and cloud computing are becoming more and more ubiquitous in the industry, discussions are now centered on more advanced technologies such as digital twins, blockchain, artificial intelligence, cognitive services, bots, and mixed reality with HoloLens—and how these can be applied to accelerate the intelligence we can extract from traditional manufacturing equipment and processes.
Machine Pagès, a company that manufactures robots destined for plastics processing, shared some exciting innovations it is driving around this topic. The company’s connected machines leverage Microsoft technologies such as Power BI and Microsoft Azure to greatly improve the reliability of its industrial processes, increase productivity, and grow customer satisfaction using data insights and predictive maintenance.
For this, Machine Pagès has used the Industry 4.0 expertise of Visian to connect their robots using their IoT platform to oversee operations, leverage insights from predictive maintenance capabilities, and allow supervision via a mobile application shared with Machine Pagès customers.
Rockwell Automation also provided Machine Pagès with a Power BI dashboard that allows the company to track the status of its machines down to the finest level of detail by aggregating data from the production controller and other IoT sensors. If the performance of a machine starts to decline, or the rejection rate increases, the source of this change can be quickly analyzed and fixed in real-time.
Machine Pagès shared that the secure-by-design Azure architecture reassures its customers of the security and openness of its solutions.
We also heard from our own HoloLens team about how manufacturers are leveraging mixed reality to erase the limits between physical and digital to improve efficiency for service technicians, for example. The example of Total HoloPro Training implemented with Conseil3D was presented during the session.
Another story is the work that thyssenkrupp Elevator is doing with HoloLens to help its 24,000 elevator service technicians visualize and identify problems ahead of a job, and have remote, hands-free access to technical and expert information when onsite, improving the way people and cities move.
We’d like to thank our customers and partners from Conseil3D, EDF Energy, Do You Dream Up, La FIEEC, Machine Pagès, Saur, TechnipFMC, and Visian who all shared their insights, best practices, and advanced strategies around many exciting Industrie 4.0 topics at the event.
If you would like to see this next revolution in digital transformation for yourself, please join us at Hannover Messe 2017 on April 24-28 in Hannover, Germany. Our industrial innovation showcases will demonstrate how some of the top manufacturers in the world are already realizing true business excellence and impactful ROI as a result of their transformations. We’ll give you a hands-on roadmap that will show you how your business can achieve similar results.
Until then, to help you get started today, I encourage you to start with our white paper series, where we share opportunities for manufacturers to grow, adapt and evolve to address the changing needs of their customers and capture new business potential.
Twitter: @sanrav
