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DataOps Plus AI and ML Power New Hitachi IoT Manufacturing Suite

• By Richard Seeley
• September 11, 2019

Integrating DataOps, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), Hitachi Vantara is touting big data technology in a Tuesday announcement of its Lumada Manufacturing Insights, a suite of Industrial Internet-of-Things (IoT) products.

DataOps, which is an "automated, process-oriented methodology, used by analytic and data teams," according to a Wikipedia article, appears to be a major emphasis for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan's Hitachi, Ltd. "We know DataOps," pops out in large white letters on the first page of the company Web site. After asking if the Web visitor knows about the methodology, the site proclaims: "You know there's value in your data. But you've only scratched the surface. To get the full value out of your data, you need to get the right data to the right place at the right time. DataOps helps you do that."

An obvious play on the popular DevOps methodology, DataOps, was originally a set of best practices for quality improvement and reduction of the cycle time for data analytics, the Wikipedia article explains. Incorporating Agile methodology, DataOps has evolved from best practices into an approach designed to cover the data lifecycle and integrate data analytics teams with IT operations with the goal of reducing analytics development time to achieve business goals.

For the Hitachia Vantara those goals are to improve factory and other industrial processes by providing data for AI and ML via IoT devices for Manufacturing 4.0, which Hitachi defines as using data to enhance manufacturing.

"Data and analytics have the power to modernize and transform manufacturing operations," Brad Surak, chief product and strategy officer at Hitachi Vantara was quoted as saying in the new product announcement. "But for too many manufacturers today, legacy infrastructure and disconnected software and processes slow innovation and impact competitive advantage."

The new suite, which is scheduled to be available worldwide on Sept. 30, is designed to implement data science for predictive and prescriptive analytics to improve manufacturing processes, the announcement said. "The solution integrates with existing applications and delivers actionable insights without the need for a rip-and-replace change of costly manufacturing equipment or applications," the company said. "Lumada Manufacturing Insights supports a variety of deployment options and can run on-premises or in the cloud."

According to Hitachi Vantara the combination of DataOps with AI and ML provides the customer with technology to:

• Build on the intelligent manufacturing maturity model and empower the digital innovation foundation for continuous process improvement.
• Integrate data silos and stranded assets and augment data from video, lidar and other advanced sensors to drive innovative new use cases for competitive advantage.
• Drive 4M (machine, man, material and methods) correlations for root-cause analysis at scale.
• Evaluate overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and enhancement recommendations based on advanced AI and ML techniques.
• Evaluate scheduling efficiency and optimize for varying workloads, rates of production and work-order backlogs.
• Monitor and guide product quality with predictive and prescriptive insights.
• Improve precision of demand forecast and adherence to production plans and output.

The Hitachi Vantara press release quoted early adopters to the new technology with real world applications for it.

Shannon Lucas, head of customer unit emerging business for Ericsson North America, said his company will use Lumada Manufacturing Insights for development of 5G Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) senors designed for factory-type uses.

Shuja Goraya, CTO at Precision Drilling Corp., was quoted envisioning the product supporting worker safety as well as efficiency in oil field drilling applications: "Humans and machines working together to deliver the vision of 'digital drilling' is driven by our ambition to achieve transformative outcomes, drilling our best wells every time and consistently achieving 'Target Zero' for accidents. With Hitachi Vantara, we are realizing time to value with industrial analytics and the powerful Lumada platform to process more than 20,000 data streams per second per rig, providing actionable information to the right people at the right time and helping make optimal decisions ... It's driving process optimization through effectively identifying improvement opportunities and shortening well delivery times for our customers. It's all about effective use of data to make better decisions and then being able to consistently execute on these learnings."