In depth: Siemens’ smarter manufacturing Siemens entered a strategic collaboration with By connecting the factory to the cloud, This saves both time and money, as central Amazon Web Services in 2012 and followed workers were able to view problems such as management of edge devices and apps reduces up with a series of other investments, resulting a malfunctioning machine, in real-time, and deployment and maintenance expenditures. in the development of MindSphere in 2017. make immediate improvements. By 2018, MindSphere is a cloud-based operating system Siemens made MindSphere available on Today, Siemens’ multi-cloud strategy allows it to built on native AWS technologies. It can Microsoft Azure, which enabled a bigger base offer offers a range of cloud-based solutions to process data, in real-time, from thousands or of customers to achieve quick time-to-value customers in many other industries, including even millions of devices and sensors in plants, and scale across the enterprise. healthcare and infrastructure, to bring greater systems, machinery and products dispersed ef昀椀ciency and cost savings from their machines throughout production processes and supply In 2019, Siemens announced a new and processes. chains. All this is possible due to an architecture cooperation with Google Cloud to optimize where edge and cloud computing are working factory processes and improve productivity seamlessly to deliver this business outcome. on the shop 昀氀oor. By combining Google Cloud’s data cloud and AI/machine learning MindSphere was deployed that same year at capabilities with Siemens’ Digital Industries Siemens’s own factory in Monterrey, Mexico, Factory Automation portfolio, manufacturers which manufactures more than 28 million visually inspect products or predict wear-and- circuit breakers and switches every year for the tear of machines on the assembly line. Another US market. The factory was 昀椀nding it dif昀椀cult solution from its digital enterprise portfolio, to monitor the overall ef昀椀ciency of equipment, Industrial Edge, allows manufacturers to collect including unplanned downtimes and uneven local data from IoT devices, which can be quality of production. preprocessed and sent to the cloud in small packages. Ever–ready for every opportunity 17