Digital Manufacturing Solutions
Build Agile Factory. Transform Workforce. Resilient Supply Chain.
Achieve Faster Time-to-Market and Production Efficiencies with
Manufacturing and Internet of Things (IoT) Solutions
Overcoming Manufacturing Biggest Challenges
Overlooked Faults & High Downtime
- Unreliable Equipment
- Increasing and Unplanned Downtime
- Inefficient Equipment Usage
High Inspection & Maintenance Costs
- Undefined Inspection Processes
- Manual Inspections
- Unoptimized Maintenance Schedules
- Inefficient Maintenance Planning
Poor Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)
- Delayed Equipment Changeover Time
- Slow Rate of Production
Discord Processes & Unsatisfied Employees
- Ineffective Processes
- Employee Dissatisfaction
- Talent Drain
Adapting to Evolving Manufacturing Practices to Minimize Risk and
Promote Sustainable Growth
Predictive Maintenance
AI-powered predictive maintenance boosts equipment reliability and helps manufacturing organizations stay ahead of unexpected issues that can easily disrupt production.
By analyzing metrics and data related to the lifecycle maintenance of IoT-enabled equipment through predictive maintenance, companies can predict both timelines for probable maintenance events and upcoming capital expenditure requirements, allowing them to streamline their maintenance costs and avoid critical downtime.
Key Benefits
Reduce Maintenance Cost
Reduce Downtime
Reduce Inspection Cost
Improve the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)
Technical Capabilities
Real-time Manufacturing Analytics
Track and oversee multiple plants and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) with the help of the Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor data.
Manufacturing Processes Management
Run adaptable manufacturing and production processes, and collaborate with the ease of an integrated environment.
Predictive Maintenance Trends
$50B is the annual cost that industrial manufacturers bear because of unplanned downtime.
60% of all positions for skilled production personnel remain unfilled due to talent shortage.
By 2024, OEMs will leverage field asset IoT data to lessen critical equipment failures by 40%.
Predictive maintenance is the top AI use case for enterprises worldwide in the manufacturing domain.
29% of AI applications assist with machinery and production assets maintenance.
Hundreds of millions of assets will be represented by digital twins in the next 3-5 years.
Automated Quality Inspection
Automated quality inspection delivers greater accuracy, is easily replicable, and ensures products are developed at the highest levels. Moreover, time to inspect is significantly reduced, thereby making it quicker for the products to go to market. An automated quality inspection process facilitates business growth and renders a positive impact on the organization’s bottom line.
Key Benefits
Improved customer satisfaction due to consistent and reliable quality standards
Limit the need for costly returns from dissatisfied customers
Technical Capabilities
Manage Manufacturing Production Processes in Real Time
Run adaptable manufacturing and production processes, and collaborate with the ease of an integrated environment.
IoT-enabled Quality Inspection
Accelerate root-cause analysis with advanced algorithms and machine learning to facilitate automated quality inspection using Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor data.
Automated Quality Inspection Trends
60% of enterprises will address skills gaps using intelligent robotic process automation by 2023.
Plants worldwide experience a 5-20% loss in overall productivity because of poor or undefined maintenance strategies.
Machine learning will improve product quality in discrete manufacturing industries by 35%.
20% of leading manufacturers will rely on embedded intelligence to automate processes in the future.
Global wages amounting to $14.6T are associated with technically automatable activities.
By 2025, the tasks completed by machines will be increased significantly, surging from 29% to 71%.
Supply Chain Optimization
Delivering intelligent supply chain to predict customer demands, sense changes in supply, and demand.
Smart connected supply chain to launch a range of highly personalized add-on services, and gaining insights about customers’ needs based on trends, signals, and behavior patterns.
Drive new growth with modern data estate, analytics, and AI by delivering exceptional customer experiences.
Key Benefits
Order Fulfillment and Promising
Sustainable Load Optimization
Logistics Network – Track and Trace
Enhanced Product & Service Delivery
Improved Material Sourcing & Logistics
Technical Capabilities
AI/ML-based Inventory Management
Boost business resilience by quickly responding to disruptions and intelligently selecting alternatives for supply shortages.
Intelligent & Connected Demand Planning
Respond to changing demand with machine learning, connected processes, and increased visibility across sales and operations planning (S&OP), forecasting, supply, replenishment, and inventory functions.
Real-time Orders & Shipments Tracking
Optimize logistics processes with visibility into goods in transit, notify stakeholders about deviations, and monitor fulfillment.
Supply Chain Optimization Trends
$2T is the potential of AI to create opportunities in supply chain management and manufacturing.
In the past few years, more than 50% of enterprises have invested in supply chain resiliency and AI, resulting in a 15% improvement in productivity.
30% anticipated decrease in exports from China, which will be covered by manufacturers and suppliers in other regions.
75% of consumer-facing manufacturers’ supply chains will manage customization at scale by 2024.
50% of warehousing activities will use robots and situational data analytics to optimize storage by 2023.
70% of supply chain leaders say their supply chain faces more frequent and impactful business disruptions.
Employee Health & Safety
Key Benefits
Minimize production downtime caused by safety violations, reducing the risk of mechanical damage and personnel injury
Ensure compliance with local and international laws and regulations, including OSHA, promoting a safe and ethical workplace culture
Improve process harmonization and enhance employee satisfaction, resulting in a more productive and engaged workforce
Technical Capabilities
Real-time OEE for Safety
Track and oversee multiple plants and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) with the help of the Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor data to ensure optimal operations and workers’ safety.
Spatial Analysis
Using computer vision, spatial analysis infers workers safety across the factory floor using videos from the IoT-enabled edge.
ML-based Disaster Prevention
Continually monitor noise levels in a factory or sense potentially hazardous situations such as fires or gas leaks in order to mitigate potential disaster.
Employee Health & Safety Trends
Workplace injuries cost U.S. companies $60B per year.
70% of the workers say they are willing to learn new skills now or retrain to improve their future employability.
20% of manufacturing companies treat their assets as internal customers, reducing asset downtime by 70%.
70% of a technician’s time can be “non-wrench time.”
Automation has created over 133 million new jobs worldwide, displacing almost 75 million workers.
75% of workers say it is essential to maintain flexibility in their work schedule.
Remote Work and Productivity
Key Benefits
Improved accessibility of technical data across the organization
Enhanced data governance and control
Increased automation of processes, resulting in time savings and reduced human errors
Technical Capability
AI, OCR and NLP-based Cloud Cognitive Search
Quickly and easily extract search results from multiple structured and unstructed data sources and interpret input data.
Remote Work and Productivity Trends
Cybersecurity damages have consequently surmounted more than $6T in annual costs in recent years.
80% of manufacturers expect that improved factory connectivity will help them significantly increase output levels.
40% of data on IoTs will be stored, processed, and examined using Cloud technology by the end of the year.
35% of workers need at least six months of efforts to develop new skills.
Process and Workflow Automation
Key Benefits
Gain and sustain operational advantage against the competition by having timely and actionable data for reporting, decision-making, and business insights
Make informed decisions based on real-time data analysis, enabling quick responses to market changes and emerging trends
Improve operational efficiency and reduce costs by having access to data-driven insights
Technical Capability
Form Recognizer
Transform large volumes of records into actionable data, digitize unstructured documents, including handwritings, and go beyond OCR to classify type of document, and extract field names, and values.
Process and Workflow Automation Trends
60% of all executives plan to build hybrid models for production and non-production processes over the next three years.
More than 75% of all chemical companies have doubled the level of digitization in past years.
Around 83% of manufacturers believe selling products as services will improve their bottom line.
A 76% increase is expected in worker production with an increase in demand for AI-based products and services.
80% increase in manufacturers who expect improved factory connectivity will help them increase output levels online channels.
Industry Scenarios
Generating Business Value Across Industries
Enterprise solutions that provide real-time, actionable insights.
To accurately visualize and present the focus points, the Manufacturing Analysis report is used to identify where production drops and gets attention to the data touchpoints that allow for reducing delays and improving the production line.
Retail Manufacturing Data Analytics report enables organizations to use powerful tools and a data-driven approach to make intelligent decisions. It allows businesses to analyze and follow up on progress and study consumer behaviors.
A complete solution encompassing everything inclusive of analytics and reporting that allows you to discover meaningful, useful insights related to human resources headcount, their effectiveness, and more. It allows HR professionals to make better data-driven decisions.
This solution helps gather and compile important data from the organization and present it through a dashboard. By bringing together all the IT asset information and developing relations with financial information, it provides complete health of the IT infrastructure that is critical to your business growth.
Through the cloud's real-time processing, organizations can monitor any external environmental factors, such as air and water quality, enabling them to be aware of any potentially harmful impacts. This also helps companies ensure their workforce's safety, avoiding any hazardous operations that may result in a catastrophe.
Manufacturing Capabilities and Benefits Overview
See How Organizations Are Innovating
Only Microsoft offered the proven, cutting-edge technologies and models that have been trained on Microsoft data sets on a very large scale and are available completely disconnected.... All of this accelerates our time to market, and that has been the key differentiator for us.
Situation
Airbus innovates continually, ever mindful of the strict security requirements that constrain many of its customers, like government agencies and international security organizations. It also envisioned AI applications to reimagine answers to complex problems.
Solution
The company created its own restricted cloud with Azure AI solutions, like its aircraft anomaly detector. It used Azure Cognitive Services to create a pilot training chatbot and a predictive maintenance solution based on Anomaly Detector.
Impact
Airbus uses the built-in functionality of Cognitive Services and Azure AI solutions to hasten development, shortening time to market. The solutions it is creating have myriad benefits, from optimizing military aircraft maintenance to making pilot training more effective.
On one hand, Microsoft Azure is continuing to emerge as the most sought-after cloud platform that is allowing us to build cutting-edge solutions, bridging the value of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge coming together. On the other hand, we’re really enthused by the vision of Piramal Glass to transform traditional processes in the Digital-1st world.”
Situation
Piramal Glass was looking to improve production efficiency and minimize defects to transform its manufacturing process with technology.
Solution
Piramal Glass leveraged IoT to get real-time visibility into its manufacturing operations and analyze the defects at various stages. Using Azure IoT Hub, data from equipment and high-speed production line sensors is pushed to the cloud for further analysis.
Impact
RTMI (Real Time Manufacturing Insights) has enhanced the efficiency of plant managers in detecting the anomalies in the process, monitoring the key performance metrics and making informed decisions in real time, reducing time on manual data and improving productivity.
+40x Improvement in forecast speed, reducing time spent forecasting from 4 weeks to 2 times a day
Situation
Kotahi set out to keep New Zealand competitive on the world stage by enhancing its business efficiency and data security and creating new revenue streams through innovative products and services.
Solution
The company took a regional leadership position by using Microsoft Azure Data Services and Azure Machine Learning for forecasting and developing new products and services tailored to customers’ real-time shipping needs and concerns.
Impact
Azure AI helps lay down the foundation to understand the data and piece everything together. It’s now enabling new opportunities for truly innovative products and services that customers need and that create new revenue streams.
We’re taking advantage of the Azure Databricks shared environment—we’ve made it our preferred collaboration platform, and it’s helping our data scientists and engineers share more and get to the next level of AI sophistication.
Situation
Safety is at the heart of everything Shell does. From exploration to extraction and all the way to retail vending, Shell prioritizes the safety of its employees, contractors, partners and customers, and the environment.
Solution
Shell is piloting a new cloud-based, deep learning solution built on Microsoft Azure. Using closed-circuit camera footage and IoT technology to automatically identify safety hazards and alert service champions so they can quickly respond and eliminate potential problems.
Impact
Using machine vision technology, combined with automated image processing and analysis, VADR (Video Analytics for Downstream Retail) adds an extra level of safety for people and the environment.
Using Azure Cognitive Search, our engineers now spend less time reworking queries and dealing with errors and more time pursuing new revenue opportunities, such as remote monitoring solutions and consultancy.
Situation
With decades of critical product documentation spread across multiple siloed systems, Royal IHC needed to empower its maritime service engineers with a fast, accurate single source of truth.
Solution
Royal IHC used Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search to create a fast, accurate AI-assisted search and knowledge mining solution. Engineers can now search more than a million documents in less than two seconds.
Impact
With Azure Cognitive Search, Royal IHC engineers find the information they need in a lot less time than it used to take, and they deliver faster time to resolution, which reduces costly downtime for customers’ complex maritime projects.
We discovered that Azure Digital Twins is already purpose-built to do what we want to do. Instead of taking a graph database and then having to build from scratch on top of it, we have all that functionality out of the box.
Situation
GE Aviation’s Digital Group needed to combine two disparate systems for recording aircraft maintenance and in-flight performance to increase efficiency, reduce costs, minimize unplanned downtime, and meet strict industry safety standards.
Solution
GE Aviation’s Digital Group deployed Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to digitize its maintenance records system and is using Azure Digital Twins to create a living data ecosystem and a traceable digital record of each aircraft’s maintenance, performance, history, and health.
Impact
GE Aviation’s Digital Group will offer a unique competitive advantage—accurate, efficient reporting capabilities and proof of compliance documentation for customers, from the fleet level to the individual aircraft and component level.
Only Microsoft offered the proven, cutting-edge technologies and models that have been trained on Microsoft data sets on a very large scale and are available completely disconnected…. All of this accelerates our time to market, and that has been the key differentiator for us.
Situation
Airbus innovates continually, ever mindful of the strict security requirements that constrain many of its customers, like government agencies and international security organizations. It also envisioned AI applications to reimagine answers to complex problems.
Solution
The company created its own restricted cloud with Azure AI solutions, like its aircraft anomaly detector. It used Azure Cognitive Services to create a pilot training chatbot and a predictive maintenance solution based on Anomaly Detector.
Impact
Airbus uses the built-in functionality of Cognitive Services and Azure AI solutions to hasten development, shortening time to market. The solutions it is creating have myriad benefits, from optimizing military aircraft maintenance to making pilot training more effective.
On one hand, Microsoft Azure is continuing to emerge as the most sought-after cloud platform that is allowing us to build cutting-edge solutions, bridging the value of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge coming together. On the other hand, we’re really enthused by the vision of Piramal Glass to transform traditional processes in the Digital-1st world.”
Situation
Piramal Glass was looking to improve production efficiency and minimize defects to transform its manufacturing process with technology.
Solution
Piramal Glass leveraged IoT to get real-time visibility into its manufacturing operations and analyze the defects at various stages. Using Azure IoT Hub, data from equipment and high-speed production line sensors is pushed to the cloud for further analysis.
Impact
RTMI (Real Time Manufacturing Insights) has enhanced the efficiency of plant managers in detecting the anomalies in the process, monitoring the key performance metrics and making informed decisions in real time, reducing time on manual data and improving productivity.
We can now provide forecasting outputs to our own staff and customers to help them do their job more effectively in minutes, rather than weeks. This simply wouldn’t have been possible without Azure.
Situation
Kotahi set out to keep New Zealand competitive on the world stage by enhancing its business efficiency and data security and creating new revenue streams through innovative products and services.
Solution
Acting on the insight that technology would inevitably disrupt the supply chain sector, the company took a regional leadership position by using Microsoft Azure and machine learning for forecasting and develop new products and services tailored to customers’ real-time shipping needs and concerns.
Impact
Azure AI helps lay down the foundation to understand the data and piece everything together. It’s now enabling new opportunities for truly innovative products and services that customers need and that create new revenue streams.
We’re taking advantage of the Azure Databricks shared environment—we’ve made it our preferred collaboration platform, and it’s helping our data scientists and engineers share more and get to the next level of AI sophistication.
Situation
Safety is at the heart of everything Shell does. From exploration to extraction and all the way to retail vending, Shell prioritizes the safety of its employees, contractors, partners and customers, and the environment.
Solution
Shell is piloting a new cloud-based, deep learning solution built on Microsoft Azure. Using closed-circuit camera footage and IoT technology to automatically identify safety hazards and alert service champions so they can quickly respond and eliminate potential problems.
Impact
Using machine vision technology, combined with automated image processing and analysis, VADR (Video Analytics for Downstream Retail) adds an extra level of safety for people and the environment.
Using Azure Cognitive Search, our engineers now spend less time reworking queries and dealing with errors and more time pursuing new revenue opportunities, such as remote monitoring solutions and consultancy.
Situation
With decades of critical product documentation spread across multiple siloed systems, Royal IHC needed to empower its maritime service engineers with a fast, accurate single source of truth.
Solution
Royal IHC used Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search to create a fast, accurate AI-assisted search and knowledge mining solution. Engineers can now search more than a million documents in less than two seconds.
Impact
With Azure Cognitive Search, Royal IHC engineers find the information they need in a lot less time than it used to take, and they deliver faster time to resolution, which reduces costly downtime for customers’ complex maritime projects.
We discovered that Azure Digital Twins is already purpose-built to do what we want to do. Instead of taking a graph database and then having to build from scratch on top of it, we have all that functionality out of the box.
Situation
GE Aviation’s Digital Group needed to combine two disparate systems for recording aircraft maintenance and in-flight performance to increase efficiency, reduce costs, minimize unplanned downtime, and meet strict industry safety standards.
Solution
GE Aviation’s Digital Group deployed Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to digitize its maintenance records system and is using Azure Digital Twins to create a living data ecosystem and a traceable digital record of each aircraft’s maintenance, performance, history, and health.
Impact
GE Aviation’s Digital Group will offer a unique competitive advantage—accurate, efficient reporting capabilities and proof of compliance documentation for customers, from the fleet level to the individual aircraft and component level.
