Manufacturing Resiliency: Best practices for ensuring continued operations

Introduction

Have you started looking for ways to let your employees work from home while continuing operations? This blog describes two best practices for addressing your immediate needs, while ensuring employee safety.

With the need to move to essential only staffing, restrictions on travel and staff proximity, and quarantines within the workforce, a growing number of manufacturing companies are finding new ways to support remote work capabilities. Constant changes to procedures and government guidelines are making it difficult to keep up with important mandates and safety precautions. For these reasons, many manufacturers are quickly enabling a new way of working to keep their operations running while ensuring the safety of all employees.

#1: Establish connectivity and visibility

Your entire manufacturing value chain creates a constant tsunami of incoming data. Finding enough data is not the challenge. The challenge is figuring out what to do with it. Organizations typically rely on disparate sources of data, resulting in complex collection and analysis. It doesn’t make things any easier, when you only have a small team of site-specific experts that hold the knowledge about each site’s unique machinery and processes.

Imagine having all of your data in one place with real-time reporting and dashboards for users to view and manage.  AWS can deliver these capabilities as a result of managing a data lake, or a system or repository of data stored in its natural/raw format.

Within your data lake you may have machine learning, analytics, and various other services. Our ingest capabilities allow you to ingest data from traditionally siloed systems such as HR, CRM, warehouse management, logistics management, and more. By ingesting data from various sources, this allows you to bring these systems, and their data, together in one place for all of your users to view and manage. You can then normalize that data through the ingest platform and make it available for machine learning, analytics, and various other services.

The result? One single source of truth for real-time tools like reporting and dashboards. Georgia-Pacific sought to move to an advanced analytics approach enabled by an operations data lake.

“We are using AWS data-analysis technologies to predict—based on the quality of a parent paper roll precisely how fast converting lines should run to avoid tearing. By reducing paper tears, we have increased profits by millions of dollars for one production line. There are 150 lines that could benefit from these optimized processes, so this is a multimillion-dollar opportunity for us.”

Steve Bakalar, Vice President of IT/Digital Transformation, Georgia-Pacific

#2: Empower digital workers with remote tools

Once you have visibility into your operations, you can enable digital workers with secure remote access. What would a digital workforce look like? When we say “digital workers” we are aren’t only talking about the plant operators. Digital workers can also be the employees who run R&D centers and other office workers. The rapid growth of remote and mobile workers is placing pressure on IT to provide fast, easy access to corporate applications and data from the device of their choice.

AWS can help you set up the following digital worker capabilities, designed to fit the needs of your organization.

• Remote access to real-time manufacturing assets and resources: AWS IoT, Amazon Connect, Amazon Kendra

With AWS IoT, you can build industrial IoT applications for predictive quality and maintenance and to remotely monitor operations. Combine machine data from a single line, factory, or a network of sites, to proactively improve performance by identifying potential bottlenecks, failures, gaps in production processes, and quality issues before they happen.

Amazon Kendra makes it easy for your workers to find the information they need. Kendra lets you easily add content from file systems, SharePoint, intranet sites, file sharing services, and more, into a centralized location so you can quickly search all of your information to find the best answer.

And when you need assistance, Amazon Connect provides a seamless experience across voice and chat for your customers and agents. This includes one set of tools for skills-based routing, powerful real-time and historical analytics, and easy-to-use intuitive management tools – all with pay-as-you-go pricing.

• Access and schedule product servicing remotely: Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon Chime

With Amazon WorkSpaces, your employees can work where they need to be. Workspaces helps mobile and remote employees access the applications users need by delivering a cloud desktop accessible anywhere with an internet connection using any supported device. Developers and test teams need access to a secure, high-performance WorkSpace for completing tasks without the expense and inventory that comes with a lot of over-provisioned physical hardware.

Amazon Chime is a communications service that lets you meet, chat, and place business calls inside and outside your organization, all using a single application. Developers can use the same communications infrastructure and services that power Amazon Chime, and add audio calling, video calling, and screen sharing capabilities directly to their applications using the Amazon Chime SDK.

• Change production by modulating resources and asset usage remotely: Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Lex, AWS Robomaker

Amazon Transcribe makes it easy for developers to add speech to text capability their applications. Audio data is virtually impossible for computers to search and analyze. Therefore, recorded speech needs to be converted to text before it can be used in applications. Amazon Transcribe uses a deep learning process called automatic speech recognition (ASR) to convert speech to text quickly and accurately.

With Amazon Lex, you can build bots to increase contact center productivity, automate simple tasks, and drive operational efficiencies across the enterprise. As a fully managed service, Amazon Lex scales automatically, so you don’t need to worry about managing infrastructure.

AWS RoboMaker is the most complete cloud solution for robotic developers to simulate, test and securely deploy robotic applications at scale. RoboMaker provides a fully-managed, scalable infrastructure for simulation that customers use for multi-robot simulation and CI/CD integration with regression testing in simulation.

Conclusion

While technology plays a key role in building resiliency, it’s important to remember that your people play an equally important role in this process. Empower them with the technology and tools needed to keep your organization on track with evolving demands and customer needs. Provide them with flexible working environments so they can continue to provide valuable knowledge from wherever they are. By establishing connectivity, gaining visibility into your operations, and enabling remote access, you can build resiliency.

Ask a question

We’d love to answer your questions about anything covered in this blog. Simply comment below, and we will respond as soon as possible. If you’re interested in learning more about how AWS can help grow your Manufacturing business, please complete the form to reach an Amazon Web Services sales representative.