Product Engineering: Amplified on the Cloud

Manufacturers of industrial and heavy machinery products face several challenges, especially those with multi-year shelf life. These include high quality costs, wastages, inefficiencies on the shop floor, under-utilization of resources, and manual operations. These challenges result in lesser productivity and longer lead times for fulfilling customer demand. Commoditized Make-To-Stock (MTS), as well as bespoke Configure-To-Order (CTO) and Engineer-to-Order (ETO) sectors require multiple ways to boost efficiency across the shop floor, business processes and the product lifecycle. 

The Infosys Digital Thread solution looks holistically at the product lifecycle from the design, engineer, manufacture and operate to end-of-life stages. This helps our customers improve their products in a closed loop process of “As-Designed” versus “As-Manufactured” versus “As-Operated” to “As-Serviced.”

The Infosys cloud-enabled PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) transformation framework enables enterprises to right-size the PLM infrastructure and leverage the elasticity and scalability of cloud. The cloud transformation also provides an opportunity to consolidate and rationalize IT infrastructure without compromising performance. The Infosys target architecture is based on a hybrid concept, utilizing on-premises and cloud-native solutions like Appstream for designer workbench. We help protect data by utilizing a secure connectivity model provided by a cloud-native solution. At the same time, we ensure minimal transition downtime through an incremental migration approach to allow for syncing large design data volumes.

Digital and Smart Manufacturing transformation through Infosys Industry 4.0 solution helps our clients be more productive with enhanced quality. Organizations on their journey towards Industry 4.0 standards face some typical challenges that lead to high operating expenses and disruptions in operations. These include disconnected systems and siloed data, uncertainty in demand, and implementation barriers. 

Infosys Connected Operations on Cloud enables enterprises to overcome the above challenges and achieve excellence across several operational parameters. It is a suite of modular pre-configured and ready-to-deploy applications developed with ISA95 standard-based integration of machines, processes, systems, and people. It spans multiple modular apps spanning manufacturing, planning, maintenance, quality and logistics to achieve operational excellence. It allows manufacturers to adopt technology, including emerging technologies deployed on cloud, rules-based process automation, and pan-factory robotic automation with product engineering knowledge to design new products and accelerate development. Our cloud-native solution for manufacturing not only provides a data backbone for critical processes such as design-to-engineering, engineering-to-manufacturing / deployment, and order-to-cash, it also offers elastic computational power for Industrial Internet of Things-driven production chains. Significantly, the cloud empowers manufacturers to adopt pre-engineered components and Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML)-based accelerators for integrated product development. 

Infosys has deployed agile DevOps / AIOps processes and continuous delivery workflows in hybrid and AWS environments for manufacturers of industrial motors, HVAC systems, power turbines, as well as aerospace companies in the MRO business to service-end customers. Each project validates our digital approach and advanced solutions to maximize cloud adoption. 

Create a connected ecosystem

The cloud facilitates a remote, always-connected production landscape. It empowers producers to design, manufacture, sell and service anywhere. Such flexibility is achieved through enhanced visibility into enterprise applications and extreme automation. Further, the cloud connects devices, assets, applications and the factory floor, supporting use cases such as predictive asset maintenance and service. 

Digital tools assess the application portfolio and create a roadmap for cloud migration. A connected, secure cloud ecosystem empowers manufacturers to foster technological improvement and acquire capabilities for smart manufacturing. 

The Infosys Cobalt Store offers pre-configured, industry-specific solutions, pre-built accelerators, IP tools, and reference documents for cloud deployment. The Infosys Industry 4.0 Assessment solution assesses the digital maturity of manufacturing plants. It helps consultants assign capability scores and generate a summary in tabulated or chart formats for reporting and analysis. Our Cloud Migration Assessment Tool analyzes migration readiness using the 12-factor methodology to evaluate application source code. It highlights areas of non-conformity at the file level and offers recommendations to address gaps along with effort and cost estimates. 

Infosys partnered with a heavy electrical equipment manufacturing unit for ETO to CTO transformation. A digital thread, consistent data and BOM parameterization facilitated bespoke product and machine configurations. Our cloud solution helped the OEM convert 95% of ETO products to pre-engineered CTO combinations and reduce configure-to-delivery lead time for product variants from 28 days to 8 days.

Transform legacy models

Cloud platforms provide a unified framework for the digital transformation of the product lifecycle and business model. High system availability, secure data storage and multi-tier redundancy enable collaborative engineering. Moreover, seamless connectivity between each stage of the manufacturing process and internal and external stakeholders drives product innovation.

The ability of the cloud ecosystem to scale up with dynamic processing loads enables OEMs to capitalize on a digital twin, simulation models and mixed reality to enhance core engineering services and address operational challenges. Besides, pre-configured solutions may be adopted for product customization with minimal impact on lead time and costs. In addition, the connected experience delivered by our cloud-native platform enhances maintenance, procurement, sales and customer service. 

Infosys developed an AWS hosted predictive maintenance solution for a large nuclear and renewable energy company. Real-time data from critical power generation equipment and power generation systems were processed. The AWS architecture helped optimize the architecture and data pipeline and integrate it into the data workbench for analytics and insights. 

Summary

Smart factory solutions hosted on the cloud simplify product design and development processes, shop floor systems and business operations. Dashboards for monitoring real-time condition of machines, energy consumption and waste generation enhance operational efficiency. Moreover, the cloud supports analytical tools for self-optimization and autonomous decision making.

Manufacturers accelerate the development of IIoT applications by capitalizing on the services offered by public cloud providers like infrastructure management that maximize bandwidth utilization of their IT teams. 

The Infosys Infrastructure Automation platform streamlines configuration and augments the development lifecycle. It offers a simple user interface to capture infrastructure requirements and reusable templates to collect data for infrastructure provisioning. In addition, the Infosys Asset Management Solution enables condition monitoring and incorporates an alert engine, as well as diagnostics tools for predictive maintenance of machinery. 

Infosys migrated PLM workloads of an HVAC manufacturing plant to a hybrid cloud. As a result, we simplified enterprise operations and boosted asset performance by integrating on-premises components and hosting over 15 engineering applications on the cloud.

As a Premier Consulting Partner and Managed Services Provider of the AWS Partner Network, Infosys offers end-to-end services for AWS Cloud. Our engagement models include outcome-based services (gain share model), pre-configured and ready-to-deploy micro-applications (as-a-service model), and single contract owners for hardware, software and professional services (bundled engagement model).

Infosys migrated an on-premises PLM to AWS cloud, using the autoscaling feature for non-native engineering applications. Automated performance and load testing were performed to benchmark the system reliability. The solution delivered a 50% improvement in performance with a 40% reduced cost.  Furthermore, it met 99% system reliability and reduced disaster recovery time by 80% to 2 hours, increasing customer confidence in the cloud solution. 

Infosys and AWS bring capabilities together to drive customers’ business and IT priorities through comprehensive cloud offerings delivered through Infosys Cobalt. Connect with us to learn how we can help you today.

About the Authors

Vijay Prasana is AWS WW Partner Solution Architect for Infosys

Abhishek Goyal is Vice President & Global Practice Head for Digital Engineering at Infosys