Oracle brings Industry 4.0 capabilities for its IoT Cloud

Empowering modern businesses to improve production intelligence and market responsiveness, Oracle unveiled new Industry 4.0 capabilities for Oracle Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud. The advanced monitoring and analytics capabilities of the new offering enables organizations to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and identify new sources of revenue through advanced tracking of assets, workers, and vehicles; real-time issue detection; and predictive analytics.

According to The Economist Intelligence Unit, 63 per cent of manufacturers have either undergone substantial digital transformation or are in the process of transforming parts of their organization, and 19 per cent are developing transformation strategies. To remain competitive in the modern economy, businesses need to leverage new technologies and data to modernize their supply chains and improve visibility, predictive insights, and automation through connected workflows.

With new augmented reality, machine vision, digital twin and data science capabilities, Oracle IoT Cloud enables organizations to gain rich insight into the performance of assets, machines, workers, and vehicles so they can optimize their supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics, reduce time-to-market for new products, and enable new business models.

“IoT is the great enabler of Industry 4.0’s potential, providing real-time visibility and responsiveness at every step of the production process – from raw materials to customer fulfilment,” said Bhagat Nainani, Group Vice-President, IoT Applications, Oracle.

“Oracle empowers organizations to create smart factories and modern supply chains with seamless interaction models between business applications and physical equipment. By receiving real-time data streams enhanced with predictive insights, our IoT applications provide intelligent business processes that deliver quick RoI.”

Today’s expansion follows the recent announcement of artificial Intelligence, digital thread and digital twin for supply chain, as well as industry-specific solutions for Oracle IoT Cloud. Oracle IoT Cloud is offered both as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, as well as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, enabling a high degree of adaptability for even the most demanding implementations.

“We plan to leverage Oracle IoT Cloud and its machine learning capabilities to automatically analyze information gathered from the robot and process-monitoring systems. These analytics could help Noble identify ways to reduce cycle time, improve the manufacturing process, enhance product quality, and cut downtime,” said Scott Rogers, technical director at Noble Plastics.

Oracle plans to add the new capabilities across the entire range of IoT Cloud Applications – Asset Monitoring, Production Monitoring, Fleet Monitoring, Connected Worker, and Service Monitoring for Connected Assets:

· Digital Twin: Enables remote users to monitor the health of assets and prevent failures before they occur, as well as running simulations of “what-if” scenarios in the context of the business processes. With Digital Twin, organizations have a new operational paradigm to interact with the physical world, allowing lower operational and capital expenditures, minimizing downtime, and optimizing asset performance.

· Augmented Reality: Gives operators and plant managers the ability to view operational metrics and related equipment information in the context of the physical asset for faster troubleshooting and assisted maintenance. In addition, the use of AR in training technicians reduces errors and on-boarding time, and improves user productivity.

· Machine Vision: Provides detailed non-intrusive visual inspections, which can detect defects invisible to the naked eye, at high speed and scale. Following the rapid inspection, Machine Vision sets in motion appropriate corrective actions when anomalies and errors are spotted.

· Auto Data Science: Automated business-specific data science and artificial intelligence algorithms continuously analyze asset utilization, production yield and quantity, inventory, fleet performance, as well as worker safety concerns, to predict issues before they arise. Auto Data Science features enable users to see performance metrics of each step in the modern supply chain with the ability to drill down into specific issues at each location without employing an army of data scientists.

Oracle IoT Cloud enables companies to monitor capital-intensive assets to reduce downtime and servicing costs, and track utilization for accurate lifecycle insights and asset depreciation data, which improves enterprise procurement efficiency. The rich pool of data created by sensors within products enables organizations to offer their products as a service, gain insight into how customers are using their products, and offer improved value-added services that drive new sources of revenue.