Manufacturing Success Through Data-Driven Operations

Many manufacturers have faced more change in the last five years than in the previous 20. Increased complexity, competition and a changing environment is putting more pressure on manufacturers to increase agility and flexibility to meet customer demands while operating at higher levels of efficiency and resilience. Digital solutions offer a path to succeed in this environment. Still, they create a growing digital divide between those who can benefit from these solutions now and those who have not started their digitalization journey. Today, Hitachi Vantara proudly announces a range of enhancements to Hitachi’s Lumada Manufacturing Insights, a solution suite that helps manufacturers accelerate their Manufacturing 4.0 journey.

Knowledge Is Power

The more you know, the better off you are. But how do you know what you don’t know?

When it comes to manufacturing, knowing more means tapping data-driven insights and visibility across physical assets, processes and systems. By implementing end-to-end solutions that leverage data from machines and sensors, ubiquitous connectivity, sophisticated predictive analytics and AI, manufacturers can harness the kind of operational insights that can optimize production, regardless of ever-changing factors. This level of intelligence helps reduce operational overhead and cost through more accurate forecasting and optimal resource usage.

Hitachi’s Lumada Manufacturing Insights magnifies a manufacturers knowledge by extracting data from industrial equipment and support systems to guide data-driven decision-making. Notable enhancements announced in today’s launch include new functionalities that play key roles in boosting the manufacturing value chain. From modules that increase resiliency through enhanced end-to-end supply chain visibility, to features that source data from multiple points to offer more accurate productivity and maintenance forecasting, and tools that overall increase digitalization on the factory floor, this upgraded suite is packaged for every stakeholder across the value chain in the manufacturing process.

Multiple Data Type Integration Delivers Actionable Intelligence

Lumada Manufacturing Insights taps into operational systems and integrates multiple data types, such as machine data, video, audio and vibration to forecast the potential failure of assets to take direct, demand-driven proactive action. Manufacturers can then better predict points of failure and perform preventive maintenance at the right time, reducing downtime and improving output. For example, by applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), equipment failure prediction in two months can be calculated. That 60-day window provides ample opportunity to schedule the repair during routine downtime and avoids unnecessary production interruptions. Reduced downtime, shipment delays and lower costs increase on-time deliveries and customer satisfaction.

End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility

Managing the complexity of your supply chain is an enormous challenge. Changing consumer behaviors as well as a network of suppliers with independent systems and varying degrees of digitalization and connectivity limit your end-to-end visibility in the best of times. As the COVID-19 pandemic and other recent events have proved, supply chains are especially vulnerable during times of disruption. The global business environment is highly connected – volatility in one area quickly impacts others. Highly complex products, demanding customers and leaner inventories require organizations to improve supply chain performance to survive — and thrive. Improving your supply chain resilience and agility is now a business imperative.

Managing supply chains in times of disruption requires a particular set of lenses. An urgency for visibility and data-driven insights maintains an acute viewpoint across supply chain operations. The supply chain control tower solution powered by Lumada Manufacturing Insights allows you to integrate data and information across your supply chain and use predictive algorithms to recognize and mitigate potential disruptions.

Digitalizing Factory Floor Processes

Deploying digitalization is not limited to automating data intelligence in supply chains. We embed process intelligence, utilizing data from IoT sensors, into our solutions for autonomous monitoring and greater quality assurance. Our suite of tools now extends to support the digitizing of forms for factory floor processes — a practice that is still largely done with pen and paper and spreadsheets, which now can be replaced with “if this, then that” protocols across manufacturing processes. Instead of manually keeping record of just-in-time material shipments, changes in engineers, production logs or logistics documents, you can digitize and automate to streamline the approach and increase the accuracy of factory floor processes.

Easy Deployment in the Cloud

We’re proud to announce that, in addition to being able to deploy the Lumada Manufacturing Insights suite on premises or on the cloud, we are an Azure Cloud Reseller and our Lumada Manufacturing Insights solution is listed in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace – making implementation adaptable to both your capabilities and your budget. We collaborate with our partners to mindfully offer our clients lower costs and shorter times to market.

Lumada Manufacturing Insights is, by design, cloud-agnostic and can be deployed on AWS. We also collaborate with AWS to ensure best possible performance and experience on their cloud platform.

Data-Driven Industrial Solutions

We believe that Hitachi Vantara has a unique offering in the marketplace for manufacturing solutions with key differentiators that include:

• A deep understanding of customer challenges that stem from being a large and diverse manufacturer ourselves. We reinvest our domain expertise into the solutions we offer and deliver a combination of products, technologies and services.
• Proven end-to-end solutions focused on tangible business outcomes, in everyday use across varied environments, industries and geographic areas.
• Lumada, which includes a recognized IoT software stack that’s open, lightweight and flexible, and integrates with Lumada Manufacturing Insights as well as other applications to deliver an optimized architecture for a wide range of outcomes.
• Consulting capabilities that include extensive experience, strong business relationships and deep bench strength around implementation, integration, management of business applications like Oracle and SAP ERP applications.

To find out more about how each of the new modules of Lumada Manufacturing Insights can accelerate the digitalization of your manufacturing business outcomes visit Lumada Manufacturing Insights.

Hitachi Vantara — Your Digital Guide

The news of enhancements to Lumada Manufacturing Insights suite came as part of a broader announcement of an expanded set of offerings to help manufacturers accelerate Manufacturing 4.0 initiatives. These offerings also assist with safely restarting production in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and help organizations to be better prepared in a new digital world where the pace of business is faster and the need to be agile is greater than ever.

Enabling accelerated digitalization across the manufacturing value chain is a prerequisite for survival in an era of rapid technology evolution and major disruptions that dramatically change both customer demands and competition. As one of the world’s largest manufacturers producing a wide range of goods, from microchips to excavators, Hitachi is leveraging its unrivaled IT and operational technology (OT) heritage for the benefit of other manufacturers in a range of services, from business consulting to support. By combining machine learning, data analytics and domain expertise, Lumada Manufacturing Insights aggregates and analyzes new combinations of data. The result: Without building a new factory or rip-and-replace projects, manufacturers can realize the benefits of Industry 4.0 today by engaging with Hitachi Vantara.

Get a front-row seat to the future of Social Innovation. Join us at the virtual Hitachi Social Innovation Forum on May 25-27. Register here.

Sid Verma is General Manager of the Manufacturing Practice at Hitachi Vantara.