ROLE OF DIGITAL TWIN-IAPM IN MANUFACTURING

Can you imagine scenarios where a digital solution can help you see the unseeable?

• A chief engineer at a power plant that feeds power to a large process industry receives a priority alert to immediately inspect high furnace exit temperature, indicating a possibility of excess heat pickup in the super-heater and pre-heater sections of the power plant boiler.
• An O&M engineer in an iron and steel plant receives instructions on his hand-held device to perform a static stress analysis of the heavy-duty industrial conveyor structure at a very particular location during the next planned shutdown.
• An OEM of a windmill receives actual field performance inputs from thousands of machines across a wide geographic area directly connected with their PLM that could guide them to upgrade specific designs for product improvement and provide insights on possible cost-reduction options.
• The C-suite of a large marine engine manufacturing company is provided with persona-based information to tackle invisible inefficiencies lurking in the engines that distracts associated KPIs such as field complaints, component wise failure rates, total cost of ownership, overall equipment effectiveness, remaining useful life, Operations & Maintenance expenses etc., which directly impact the bottom-line of the company

What do the above narratives have in common?

These personnel are being augmented with physics, engineering, and business insights, enabling them to drive business outcomes. These insights are emerging out of digital or virtual replicas of assets or processes called DIGITAL TWIN.

When you have a Digital Twin in a manufacturing environment, your machines start speaking to you. With this, you are evolving your manufacturing into smart manufacturing through digital intervention.

Digital Twin enables you to run your plant operations in optimal cost mode & optimal efficiency mode. With this, manufacturing companies can now simulate and test all aspects of production even before the start of actual production. This enables them to increase the productivity, flexibility, and efficiency of the manufacturing systems.

Common questions that the manufacturing sector typically ponder are:

• What are those appropriate use cases in my organization that fit best for inducting Digital Twins?
• How will I manage the IT-OT integration to create a conducive ecosystem?
• What are the steps that I need to plan to build Digital Twins for my organization?
• What kind of technologies & competencies does my organization need to induct and operate Digital Twins?

The list goes on….

In many cases the answers emerging out of introspection are complex, or have gray areas or gaps, resulting in organizations dropping the idea of introducing Digital Twins. This is a common oversight, as we know Digital Transformation in manufacturing verticals are becoming a mandatory foundation for companies to sustain their business. Industrial houses that do not adapt will be left behind, risking impact on profitability, which makes it even harder to invest in innovation. Digital Twin is one of the key enablers that helps manufacturing companies to drive Digital Transformation purely through digital intervention, it ingests the data that you have and gives back the data that you don’t have.

How do we address this situation?

To overcome such a situation, you need a platform which helps you start and accelerate your Digital Transformation journey in an Industry 4.0 environment, harvesting the data that belongs to your organization, as well as applying AI within the framework of business optimization to drive the desired business outcome.

The ideal solution would be to work with industry leaders who have the best-in-class manufacturing expertise and a solid hold on cloud technology. This is exactly what Bosch & Microsoft combined can bring to the table respectively.

We help you build Digital Twins in a participative way. This means you will be a part of solution building activities which systematically enable you to have your Digital Twins running on Azure.

The sensors, software and services framework from Bosch involving the connect, collect, consume and cognition layers help you to adopt the asset templates hosted on Azure.

Azure IoT components, such as Azure IoT Hub, allow you to build highly scalable and reliable solutions to modernize your industrial operations to a smart factory.

We Help You Simplify Complex Industrial Data Flow!

Machines that can natively communicate on OPC UA can directly connect to IoT Edge. IoT Edge is the compute power that sits on your on-premises network. It's the runtime environment of the Industrial Modules. Modules, in simple terms, are nothing but containers that run Azure services, 3rd party services, or your own code. Azure IoT Hub connects the devices virtually to the cloud for further data processing. It enables security-enhanced bidirectional communications between Digital Twins and associated devices.

For manufacturers, the true success from Digital Transformation is defined by how effective they were in breaking down silos and gaining a holistic view across a diverse fleet of assets that run their entire operations. It is also determined by how logically they were able to extract relevant data from assets and transform the extracted data into insights to drive cascading improvements across all manufacturing processes. But there are some big challenges in getting there—the data path is generally several layers deep over several protocols and enabling those layers to communicate freely with each other can be an expensive and complex proposition. While the Device bridge package from Bosch simplifies this situation, Microsoft Azure offers a path to effectively manage requirements that calls for ISA-95 compliance. Azure Industrial IoT enables both established plants and new plants to be equipped with Integrated Asset Performance Management powered by Digital Twins from Bosch which helps you to achieve perpetual connectivity with your assets, holistic monitoring, and optimization functions for your needs to add digitalization elements to your manufacturing.

For more details please visit:

Bosch Digital Twin - IAPM
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Prahallad CR ► Partner Customer Solutions, Bosch

Kai Uwe Beecken ►IoT – Principal Solution Specialist, Microsoft

Bhuvan Shetty ► Sr. Manager Sales and Global Strategic Partnerships, Bosch