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- Industry 4.0 in practice: TRUMPF brings IoT to manufacturing
Industry 4.0 in practice: TRUMPF brings IoT to manufacturing
Maximising efficiency
With a strategic serverless AWS manufacturing platform
Remote management
All Edge devices are managed remotely
Rapid development
Built a solution from scratch in just 18 months
Challenge
TRUMPF embraces data as a factor of production and a key element of business process improvement. Having the right data is also crucial to make just-in-time management part of business as usual. But in a connected world, data must be sourced, combined and collated from multiple internal and external sources and choreographed in real time. In practice, just-in-time management must be aligned with the Internet of Things (IoT) to facilitate a real-time manufacturing ecosystem that accommodates continual change.
To bring its real-time vision to life, TRUMPF required some bespoke technology. Certain products need an industrial PC (IPC) acting as a flexible Edge Device. This is installed on the customer’s premises and connects all the relevant hardware and software. These IPCs must be updated regularly to the latest version of their operating system and product software. TRUMPF wanted to implement a solution to manage and monitor the IPCs remotely once they are installed at the customer’s premises. It asked GFT for help.
Engagement
GFT surveyed the technical landscape and proposed a bespoke system that would be built from the ground up. Once operational the solution would empower TRUMPF to send an IPC to a customer then manage and update a Linux-based operating system remotely. GFT proposed other key technologies including Docker and a range of AWS tools to manage the solution.
As an established strategic TRUMPF partner, GFT harnessed its nearshore delivery hub to design, build and implement a customised version of Ubuntu Server operating system using Agile methods and continuous delivery. The project delivered a tailored solution founded on AWS. In practice TRUMPF has a real-time ecosystem that can:
- Automate the set-up of all cloud IoT Edge devices
- Customise individual IoT Edge devices to meet individual requirements
- Monitor, maintain and upgrade IoT Edge devices remotely
- Maintain a continuous delivery pipeline for all exposed APIs
The new platform offers TRUMPF a centralised device configuration management solution based on AWS OpsWorks. As well as empowering TRUMPF to manage the software remotely, the solution offers continual monitoring on dashboards using AWS CloudWatch, Telegraf and Grafana.
Benefit
The success of the project signals a new era of automation and control. With a holistic real-time view of its business workflows, TRUMPF can focus on writing its own software products, free from the worry of running and managing operating systems. The new platform also offers sustainable business benefits:
- Business processes can be built and shaped using accurate real-time data
- As a serverless cloud solution it can be scaled quickly with no interruption to business as usual
- Pay-as-you-go pricing means costs are always aligned to use
- New features can be deployed quickly on premises and cloud, delivering more value in less time
- Product developers can create virtual instances, based on AWS Service Catalog and EC2 to streamline software development without relying on physical hardware.
The solution, which was built from scratch in 18 month. The platform is an important step to develop an operational device management standard within TRUMPF.
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Industry 4.0 in practice: TRUMPF brings IoT to manufacturing