GFT promotes digital transformation in factories with new industry-specific Google Cloud solutions
Finding and hiring data scientists is one of the biggest challenges in the current job market. Analysts say that as early as 2020, there was a global shortage of 250,000 data scientists. Since then, the situation has worsened.
AI solutions have the potential to significantly increase productivity in manufacturing. Typically, skilled data scientists are key to the success of AI projects. However, Google Cloud has now introduced new, specially developed solutions that can be used by engineers in manufacturing: They don't need the help of specialised data scientists or additional integration code to bring digital transformation pilot projects to production. This will facilitate digital transformation efforts in manufacturing. As a Google Cloud Global Partner, GFT has tested and implemented the solutions at leading automotive and manufacturing companies.
"These solutions will democratise access to data in manufacturing. They will increase industry competitiveness and enable manufacturing engineers to acquire AI-based skills," said Marco Santos, President US and Latin America at GFT. "Our first-hand experience tells us that manufacturers can expect to see significant advances in their manufacturing operations."
"Transforming factory operations using data and analytics is critical for manufacturers today," said Charlie Sheridan, Technical Director, Industry Solutions, Manufacturing at Google Cloud. "We're excited to work with partners like GFT to extend the reach of our core technology and provide our customers with the foundational technologies they need to solve their business challenges and scale smart factory implementations."
New Google Cloud solutions supported by GFT include:
Manufacturing Data Engine, an end-to-end solution for processing, contextualising and storing factory data on Google Cloud's market-leading data platform. The solution offers a configurable and customisable approach to ingesting, transforming, storing and accessing factory data. It integrates key Google Cloud products such as Cloud Dataflow, PubSub, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Looker, Vertex AI, Apigee and others into a manufacturing-specific solution.
Manufacturing Connect, an edge manufacturing platform co-developed by Litmus Automation that rapidly connects to and streams data from nearly all manufacturing equipment and industrial systems to the Google Cloud, based on an extensive library of over 250 machine protocols. Extensive integration with the Manufacturing Data Engine enables rapid data ingestion into Google Cloud for processing machine and sensor data. The ability to deploy containerised applications and ML models at the edge provides new dimensions of use cases.
The exposed data can be used for a growing number of industry-specific use cases such as:
Manufacturing Analytics & Insights, which helps manufacturers quickly create custom dashboards to visualise key data - from KPIs such as overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) to sensor data from individual machines. It is integrated with the Manufacturing Data Engine. This allows engineers and plant managers to set up new machines and factories in an automated way. Standardised dashboards, KPIs and on-demand drill-downs into the data bring new insights throughout the factory. These can then be easily shared across the business and with partners.
Machine-level Anomaly Detection, which helps manufacturers identify anomalies as they occur. Google Cloud's Time Series Insights API provides real-time alerts on machine and sensor data such as noise, vibration or temperature.
Predictive Maintenance, which enables manufacturers to predict the maintenance needs of a plant and thus reduce downtime and maintenance costs. Manufacturers can use ML models and highly accurate AI optimisations that can be deployed within weeks.
With Google's new solutions, it is possible to collect, normalise, analyse and then use data to make strategic decisions, giving manufacturing engineers the tools to work autonomously. This is also an opportunity to introduce more engineers to AI-based engineering.
GFT has been working with Google Cloud for many years and has received the prestigious 'Google Cloud 2019 EMEA Breakthrough Partner of the Year' award. Today, the company employs more than 340 experienced Google Cloud engineers and architects, holds more than 200 certifications and is involved in 94 projects with Google Cloud around the world.
www.gft.com
