Realization project of a modern and flexible Industrial IoT Architecture to fully scale digital transformation

Location ➤ Germany

Customer

Our customer is a large and well-known European agricultural machinery and commercial vehicle manufacturer. Its good market position allows investment in capacity expansion and large digitalization projects.

Challenges

To remain competitive in the future, our customer decided to set up the new plant as a Smart Factory. This required a fundamentally different system and process landscape. The new IIoT architecture had to enable a production that is as automated and event-driven as possible based on measurement and process data.

Approach

We conducted a five-step approach to develop the most suitable IIoT architecture design with a scenario technique:

• Innovation Enablement: Create transparency about the status quo and significant architectural requirements

• Architecture Modeling: Set guidelines based on core principles and co-develop architectural views

• Blueprint Specification: Specify and concrete the IIoT architecture and its roll-out strategy

• Vendor and System Onboarding: Select and task vendors and architecture components

• Implementation Support and Training: Pave the way by scalable implementation and training on the job

Results

Thanks to the connection of all entities via a central integration platform and the standardization of transactions between different systems, our customer can now process customer orders significantly faster, more precisely, and with less manual effort: Orders are automatically converted into data objects, read, enriched and finally implemented by production machines. After completion of the order, these machines return the corresponding information in data form to the surrounding systems. The result is state-of-the-art, efficient production that also offers better occupational safety. In short, it is a prime example of a future-proof smart factory.