The edge you need
FactoryTalk Edge Gateway is an important foundation of a broader edge platform offering that includes elements of pre-built data analytics models, machine learning, tailored applications, and scalable compute.
Industrial data is generated in such volumes and high speeds that it is difficult to capture accurately. Even if you could, its use is likely limited by lack of both context and consumability.
With operational data locked in disparate devices or siloed in systems of record, data scientists expend significant effort on data preparation and are hard-pressed to extract actionable industrial performance insights.
Connecting the dots across these industrial data silos by building relevant OT data context is critical for generating higher value actionable insights. Furthermore, unless the industrial OT data is packaged into a logical data model that both IT and OT applications understand, IT/OT convergence remains a farfetched prospect.
FactoryTalk Edge Gateway software from Rockwell Automation addresses these challenges – unlocking actionable plant and enterprise-level insights to accelerate IIoT digital transformation. It simplifies and automates collection, contextualization and organization of industrial equipment across machines, devices, and automation assets at the source itself, enabling high data integrity from the outset.
It provides the right foundation to drive edge-to-cloud IT/OT convergence at the enterprise level so that everyone from the shop floor to the enterprise can make smarter decisions.
It is also a key pillar in Rockwell Automation’s strategy to accelerate digital agility across the industrial devices to cloud spectrum with partnerships, including PTC and Microsoft.
A leading Fortune 100 pharmaceuticals manufacturer explained, “Legacy systems today are not IIoT enabled and need many different software programs to collect and organize data. With existing methods, the operational attribute values collected have different timestamps, so it is impossible to synchronize the data together. Compared to that, FactoryTalk Edge Gateway automatically stitches the data together and puts it in a payload using pre-configured information model hierarchy. It gives one solution to collect and organize the relevant data.
FactoryTalk Edge Gateway’s unique data management capabilities result in up to a staggering 70 percent reduction in analytics data preparation efforts for data scientists or analysts, while providing higher quality OT data.
The underlying common information data model is orchestrated by the unique Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Smart Object capability and can be efficiently mapped to on-premises or cloud applications to generate predictive insights across the enterprise.
FactoryTalk Edge Gateway’s capabilities result in up to a staggering 70 percent reduction in analytics data preparation efforts for data scientists or analysts, while providing higher quality OT data.
“Industrial businesses need actionable enterprise-level insights to achieve their goals. As customers continue to drive IT/OT integration and leverage operational data to drive insights, they are realizing that having the right OT data context is critical to scale their digital transformation initiatives,” said Arvind Rao, Director, Product Management for Information Systems at Rockwell Automation.
“With FactoryTalk Edge Gateway, we are dramatically reducing the time and effort required to build, maintain and enrich this critical OT context. This provides our customers with the opportunity to realize double-digit operational improvements through analytics.”
Unlock industrial performance insights
With access to OT contextualized data, IT applications can help you to extract equipment insights across your enterprise. This provides the capability for you to quickly, easily and proactively identify process and production inefficiencies and product defects.
With less required data preparation time, you can focus on using your data to detect and resolve equipment issues and improve production output. The use cases below relating to the food and beverage and automotive and tire industries respectively, highlight the value of accurate production data and connecting your entire operational and supply chain.
Use Case 1: Delivering accurate production data
In the food and beverage industry, quality issues are often discovered after the product hits retail shelves or is in consumer hands. While initiating recall of a certain batch or lot, manufacturers need to find the issue’s root cause. For effective root cause analysis (RCA), accurate production data with timestamps for every batch and serial number is critical.
With FactoryTalk Edge Gateway software, you can collect data at high speeds and build an information model at the data source that contains the batch and serial numbers corresponding production data, including metrics such as current level, torque and speed at each stage. This information model can be pushed to data storage or IT applications, either on premise or in the cloud. With accurate production information, IT applications can now enable both process engineers and data scientists to perform RCA and prevent similar quality issues into the future.
Use Case 2: Connecting your value chain
As a result of fluctuating raw material costs and operational efficiencies, the automotive and tire industry is often faced with operational and supply chain challenges, as well as continuous pressure to maintain profitability. The tire manufacturing process is a unique mix of batch production in upstream and discrete manufacturing in downstream operations. A heterogeneous mix of control systems, protocols and outputs is very common, and plants run in departmental silos with very little data shared across the value chain.
With FactoryTalk Edge Gateway software, you can connect heterogeneous sets of assets across the complete value chain, capturing contextual OT data into a common information model and eliminating data islands.
Upstream IT applications can also use this model to establish a single source of truth to measure operational, machine and quality performance across the enterprise. With the right set of analytical tools on top of the information model, you can use the underlying OT data to predict machine and process failures and accelerate root cause analysis of quality problems.
Edge to enterprise analytics
Accelerate your digital transformation with edge to enterprise analytics that simplifies and automates industrial data collection, contextualization, and organization across equipment, devices and automation assets.
FactoryTalk Edge Gateway software integrates with a variety of cloud, IIoT and big data applications. It provides the capability to create information models in the OT layer and efficiently map to upstream IT applications to improve performance metrics such as OEE, predictive quality and process efficiency.
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