- By Bill Lydon
- October 03, 2024
- Microsoft
- Feature
Summary
Microsoft's theme at IMTS 2024 was: "Accelerate Industrial Transformation with AI."
Microsoft's theme at IMTS 2024 was "Accelerate Industrial Transformation with AI (Artificial Intelligence)," demonstrating products and partner applications. Microsoft’s manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric illustrated a framework for data integration and analysis, enabling manufacturers to ingest and organize disparate data from MES systems, machines, sensors, PLCs and various applications, creating a unified data engineering, data warehousing and business intelligence platform. The Microsoft OneLake provides a single, unified, logical data repository for an entire organization eliminating multiple data stores for different business groups inhibiting collaboration and cost burden with managing multiple resources.
Natural language interface
Copilot template for factory operations enable users, such as a Quality Engineers or Plant Managers, to communicate with the data through a chatbot or a dashboard in natural language to obtain insights and make improvement decisions. This helps manufacturers create their own solutions for front-line workers to utilize unified data. Frontline employees use natural language in terms familiar to them to query data for knowledge discovery, training, issue resolution, asset maintenance and more. For example, if a factory plant manager wants to understand why a machine is breaking, he or she can query the copilot to get insights and resolve the issue in days, according to Microsoft.
Manufacturing data models
Manufacturing data solutions in Fabric enables customers to efficiently unify, enrich and model manufacturing data, starting with factory-domain data from sensors, systems of record (MES, ERP) and industrial automation applications.It includes an ISA95 (IEC 62264) compliant data model with Microsoft connectors to Azure IoT Operations and Fabric One Lake and partner connectors. Copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI builds on top of the manufacturing data solutions foundation to enable conversational AI use cases.
The generative AI-based copilot template powered by Azure OpenAI Service is optimized with a semantic layer designed to address specific manufacturing use cases, such as quality issue including resolution and root cause analysis. The goal is empowering frontline employees with unified data, reducing the burden on IT resources and closing the IT-OT data gap. The integration of the copilot template for factory operations allows factory personnel to query data and generate insights in natural language democratized decision-making across the manufacturing business. A great example is Siemens Industrial Copilot developed in collaboration with Microsoft is a generative AI-powered assistant to improve human-machine collaboration in manufacturing.
SaaS empowers small and medium manufacturers
Microsoft products, like Dynamics 365 Field Service, provides significant opportunities for all companies to benefit from manufacturing digitalization technologies particularly small size manufacturers without major infrastructure investment that only large manufactures could afford in the past. Implementation has become easy without requirements for internal software gurus enabling business line owners including engineering manufacturing, and supply chain to apply and deploy advanced applications resulting in greater profitability profits.
Microsoft Partner ecosystem
The Microsoft Partner ecosystem enables factory data ingestion from different systems by building custom or proprietary connectors into Fabric, embedding the solution capabilities into partner applications or building custom User Interfaces for the copilot templates on Azure AI. Microsoft engages with five types of industrial partners. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming how they design products, build intelligent factories and optimize operations.
Industrial automation partners connect to, modernize and enable existing customer OT solutions seeking to digitally transform their operations. Connectivity partners ingest, normalize and contextualize edge data from 100's of protocols for dedicated systems and gateways.
System Integrators connect existing customer IT and OT solutions and integrate with the Microsoft platform. Independent Software Vendors build industry-specific solutions that are cloud-native and include end to end analytics and industrial AI services.
Original Equipment Manufacturers creating machines ready to connect and work with Azure services.
Microsoft perspectives
I had a discussion with Kathleen Mitford, corporate vice president, Global Industry Marketing, at Microsoft about manufacturing digital transition key points. Mitford reaffirmed Microsoft long-standing committed to the industrial manufacturing industry which is one of company’s largest business segments.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached the level of maturity and usability to transform manufacturing today. Microsoft provides an adaptive cloud approach and with partners helping manufacturers scale digital transformation initiatives including automation, in a secure way. Organizations use a framework that adapts information technology (IT) solutions to meet manufacturing production requirements. IT and OT resources are maximized using widely adopted standards, optimizing production and efficiently managing complex environments with a common architecture.
Simplified integration leveraging a single management framework for all edge infrastructure (provisioning, management, monitoring and updating), enterprises can reduce deployment costs and achieve interoperability of data from solution to solution. Ability to deploy any application or workload across multiple edge platforms increase adoption of repeatable software and solutions on the shopfloor.
Enterprises can more quickly deploy new innovations at lower deployment costs with one management framework and common industrial and technical standards from edge to cloud. “Microsoft is a partner first company; partners are our execution engine for our customers," Mitford said. This provides a wide range of solutions from manufacturing industry subject matter experts in various disciplines.
About The Author
Bill Lydon is a Digital Manufacturing Transformation Industry 4.0 Consultant available for consulting and advisory projects. Lydon has 35 years of experience designing and applying technology in the automation and controls industry. He started his career as a designer of computer-based machine tool controls; in other positions, he applied programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and process control technology. Working at a large company, Lydon served a two-year stint as part of a five-person task group, that designed a new generation building automation system including controllers, networking, and supervisory & control software.
He also designed software for chiller and boiler plant optimization. Bill was product manager for a multimillion-dollar controls and automation product line and later cofounder and president of an industrial control software company.
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