Champions Corner

By Carlos Pinheiro Guimaraes and Steve Garbrecht Your management says you need to operate and maintain a fleet of automated guided vehicles (AGVs). But to derive the real value from them, you’ll need to digitize the manufacturing environment and connect the vehicles, then capture and meld all that information. When AGV information is integrated with all your systems, you’ll be able to capture the necessary data, produce insights, reduce uncertainty, and support decisions. That’s truly what you’re after. A challenge with handling multiple AGVs in your operation is the connectivity. Traditionally most companies use WiFi to connect to the units, but ...

By Carlos Pinheiro Guimaraes and Steve Garbrecht In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, manufacturers can expect to see greater numbers of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) moving around their plants. AGVs make plants a safer place because they make social distancing easier. For example, someone could walk near an autonomous forklift without risk of being infecting with a virus. Even in huge industrial buildings—like factories and warehouses—workers’ paths cross frequently in the course of their jobs. AGVs also help to keep the logistical side of the operation continuously running when employees couldn’t safely be at work. These robotic machines supplement ...

Digital Transformation in the New Normal See what manufacturers are interested in for their digital solutions   To show you the current state of manufacturing, Hitachi Vantara recently held a virtual conference. The conference showcased solutions from Hitachi and from partnerships with some of our customers. At the end of the conference, we had a Q&A session and this blog captures those questions with their answers.   I think you’ll find a lot of useful information and perspectives from the speakers’ answers to the many questions posed by the conference attendees. Quick Recap of the Conference This on-line event set the stage for the manufacturing ...

Making the Right Data Available to the Right Consumers at the Right Time   Paul Lewis makes a great point in a recent blog post . He notes that traditional data management infrastructure just isn’t designed for self-service, let alone for the DataOps paradigm, which presupposes a continuous process of development, testing, and deployment. For one thing, the technologies and practices don’t align with one another and can’t be reconciled with one another. Data integration in traditional data management has different priorities and a fundamentally different purpose than data engineering in the context of self-service. DataOps , on the other hand, ...

Make sure to stop by Hitachi Booth 3816 this year at the AWS re:Invent conference. When you work with IoT data, you can encounter many problems. It can be noisy, locked in proprietary systems and restricted from other departments. To help you address many of those challenges, Lumada enables applications and storage from edge to cloud, saving wide-area network bandwidth costs so that you can better scale from edge devices to powerful multi-node cloud deployments. It can also accommodate the many protocols prevalent in the IoT space and handle the large amounts of data produced by industrial assets. Join us for a deep dive into how you can achieve ...

The different types of data in an industrial or commercial enterprises and storage technologies available In the really bad o ld days when mainframes walked the Earth, data was stored in files in whatever structure the programmer chose. Custom code had to be written to get that data and use it. After several generations of struggles that involved access methods (ISAM, VSAM) and general purpose databases (IMS), we got RDBMS and SQL, which ushered in the good old days, which are still with us.   But now that we are in the good new days, an unprecedented explosion in data volume and data types (like video, audio, geo-data and more) has led to a concurrent ...

Because compliance is by nature mandatory, it is often seen as a burden, something with little upside beyond satisfying the obligation, avoiding fines, and passing audits. But if one takes a step back from the process, it is possible to gain a new perspective, and find new value in data collected for regulatory purposes.   Remember that regulatory and compliance data is just data. It describes business activity, plain and simple. Especially in an industrial context, a huge amount of data is collected, curated, cleaned, stored and used for regulatory reporting.   While some regulatory data may be hard to repurpose for anything but compliance, other data like ...

In the modern world, it's been increasingly well understood that two cultures of technology craftsmanship have emerged and are learning from each other. We have the practice of IT, and the application of computing technology in the general business world. This type of technology practice supports the front and back office functions of companies worldwide. IT is supported by a wide and thriving network of software and vendors. The entire world essentially runs on IT infrastructure.    But there is another equally important technology culture in the world of manufacturing, commercial infrastructure, utilities, logistics and other mission-critical and high ...

Big Data, Analytics and IoT The Center of Excellence offers support which includes Demo`s, PoC`s and sales/pre-sales support functions. For more information  CLICK HERE To Request support  CLICK HERE   See below the Demo overview. Pentaho Analytics :  In collaboration with the Pentaho Solution Engineering team the CoE offers demos, including, but not limited to: Project Searchlight London Air Quality Oil refinery: predictions using events and timeseries data We can arrange technical experts to run the demo. If you would like to run the demo yourself, we can provide a virtual machine with sufficient compute resources to install the ...

Lumada Edge Intelligence Brings DataOps To The Edge Turns Legacy OT Systems Into Intelligent Assets That Manage Your Industrial and Commercial Operation   By Steve Garbrecht As part of today’s Lumada expansion news , we’re excited to introduce the new Lumada Edge Intelligence , powering actionable, real-time insights at your most critical operating sites and enabling local enterprise-class operations data management. As companies continue to digitally transform operations, edge computing capabilities are progressively critical in reducing the time to value for local data operations solutions. The whole promise of the ...

Manufacturing Transformation for the Year Ahead Manufacturing Day Resolutions for Accelerated Outcomes from Manufacturing 4.0 By Sanjay Chikarmane, SVP of Product Management for IoT & Analytics, Hitachi Vantara What a difference a year makes. In last year’s Manufacturing Day blog post , Brad talked about how important data science is to gleaning the insights you need to transform your manufacturing enterprise. Since then, that strategic necessity has escalated. Volatility in the global economic climate, geopolitical tensions, and issues related to global trade and tariffs are all having an impact on the manufacturing sector. Now ...

Self-Service: The Unfinished Revolution Few would dispute that self-service has been an incredibly positive disruption. Self-service tools and features make it easier for users to access, explore, and analyze data. Self-service technologies simplify many aspects of data preparation and data movement; for certain use cases, self-service technology also automates the experience of analysis itself. But self-service has a few drawbacks, too. First , in making things possible for users, self-service technologies create considerably more work for them, as well. A data scientist might spend the bulk of her time discovering, moving, and preparing data for ...

Watch the sessions from our Hitachi Forums in Munich, Baden, London and Stockholm:   Topic Title Abstract Link DDS IoT, AI & The Drive to Innovate Kim Naess, Lead Analytics Architect EMEA, Hitachi Vantara Hear about the importance of data, IoT and the foundations of AI Link DDS Security 360 Nigel Fenton & Sape Winterberg, Hitachi ID What is Security 360? Hear all about how to keep your assets safe: - Detect and identify Threat - Receive immediate alerts for fast ...