The data driven future of manufacturing
As product designs grow ever-more complex and interconnected, increasingly data will become the currency of manufacturing innovation, unlocking insights and optimizations that would be otherwise impossible to achieve. But as much as production data has value, it’s size, scope and complexity can also make finding those key insights a difficult task. Going forward, AI when combined with production, will serve as the backbone for data driven manufacturing and the future of the production process.
In a recent podcast, Ralf Wagner, Senior Vice President of Data Driven Manufacturing at Siemens, explored some of the applications of Siemens’ Insights Hub for gathering and analyzing shop floor data and the importance of applying AI to that data. AI is a powerful tool for manufacturing companies and, by applying it in key areas that Ralf and his team have identified, those companies can tap into a wealth of unrealized optimizations through leveraging their own data.
Check out the full podcast here or keep reading for some of the highlights of that conversation.
Accessing data insights
Collecting data is important but, to extract value from it, a platform to analyze and draw meaningful insights from it must exist as well, then these insights must be worked back into production processes. Ralf explains how Insights Hub and other similar platforms are the key to this process, enabling data driven manufacturing solutions to support continuous improvement on the shop floor.
While continuous improvement is the norm in the manufacturing industry, much of it still takes place using Excel spreadsheets or pen and paper, Ralf says. Even though this method can still produce tangible gains, it lacks the ability to isolate patterns across broad data sets or the ability to adapt quickly to changing shop floor conditions.
By using data in a systematic way, collecting it and generating insights out of that data, data driven manufacturing can help users identify the root cause of problems more easily and reach better decisions faster, allowing companies to better take advantage of the information and resources they already have.
Applying AI to shop floor data
Managing the data available from the shop floor and extracting meaningful insights from is not a simple task, but one well suited to the application of AI. However, adopting AI to the shop floor has its own, unique, challenges, Ralf explains but, over the coming years, more and more production systems will make the shift to being AI embedded and empowered.
Deploying AI to the shop floor doesn’t mean bringing the latest, most cutting-edge technology to every process, rather, it means finding the value AI can bring to users right away, be that in faster decision making or broad optimizations. With these ideas in mind, Insights Hub’s AI capabilities fall into four major buckets, designed to be appealing to different groups of users while also being accessible for them.
Out of the box AI solutions and AI-powered analytical tools are designed to put AI capabilities in the hands of non-AI experts who could benefit from them, without the need for complex setups or lengthy pre-training processes. At the same time, powerful AI model management systems, meant for data scientists, can help connect data, compute and AI model resources to efficiently train models and enhance systems with AI. Finally, the Production Copilot allows all users to simply talk to systems and receive intuitive, natural language, response to questions, analytics and problems.
Altogether the applications of AI in industry today will be the building blocks of a broader AI approach tomorrow. By starting with easy to identify and understand applications that can provide immediate value, it’s possible to build trust in, and show the value of, advanced artificial intelligence on the shop floor, a place where it can support humans and traditional processes without replacing them. By laying a strong foundation today, manufacturing companies will be able to embrace the future of data driven manufacturing to support smarter, more sustainable manufacturing goals.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
