Background
A leading global beverage manufacturer, renowned for its iconic brands, faced growing challenges in staying competitive amidst a rapidly changing market and shifting consumer demands. Recognizing the need for digital transformation to remain agile and efficient, the company embarked on a journey to modernize its production processes. Choosing EMQ’s advanced solutions, integrated with the Azure Cloud platform, the company sought to streamline production, enhance product quality, and improve its responsiveness to market trends.
Challenges
In launching its digital transformation initiative, the beverage giant encountered several key challenges:
- Data Silos: Equipment and systems from various vendors operated with different data formats and protocols, creating data silos that hindered unified data management and analysis.
- Lack of Real-Time Insights: Traditional data collection methods couldn’t provide the real-time monitoring and analysis needed for quick decision-making, affecting the ability to adjust and optimize the production process promptly.
- System Integration Complexity: With multiple production systems in place, integrating diverse equipment data into a single, manageable system posed a significant hurdle.
- Limited Analytical Capabilities: The lack of advanced data analytics tools made it difficult to extract valuable insights from vast production data, preventing intelligent, data-driven manufacturing.
- Need for Edge Computing: Real-time data processing at the edge was necessary to reduce the load on central servers and improve response times.
EMQ’s Solution
After a thorough evaluation, the beverage manufacturer selected EMQ’s industry-focused solutions in tandem with the Azure Cloud platform to support its digital transformation.
Core Components
- NeuronEX: Serving as the industrial edge gateway, NeuronEX enabled unified data collection and edge computing across multi-protocol devices, facilitating real-time data capture, processing, analysis, and transfer from various industrial equipment and production systems.
- EMQX ECP: This industrial IoT data platform provided seamless cloud-edge collaboration, enabling centralized management and monitoring of edge devices. It included single sign-on (SSO) integration for simplified access and unified device management.
- Azure EventHub: As a cloud-based message queue service, EventHub handled high-throughput data streams from the edge, supporting continuous real-time data flow.
- Azure Data Factory: This tool facilitated data storage and analysis, making production data accessible and persistent.
- Azure Active Directory (AD): Integrated with EMQX ECP’s SSO, AD offered enterprise-grade authentication and access control, ensuring secure, unified user access management.
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): Providing a containerized environment, AKS simplified the deployment and management of EMQX ECP, enhancing operational efficiency and system reliability.
Key Features
- Flexible Edge Deployment: With support for lightweight K3S deployment, NeuronEX was swiftly rolled out across approximately 50 production facilities. This agile deployment model fit well with the limited computational resources available in factories, while maintaining stability and observability.
- Comprehensive Data Collection: NeuronEX’s OPC UA protocol support enabled seamless data acquisition from SCADA systems, unifying production data entry. It also supported incremental data pull from SQLServer databases, allowing integration with third-party systems.
- Edge Computing and Real-Time Analysis: NeuronEX facilitated pre-processing and initial data analysis on-site, ensuring standardized data handling and reducing central processing burdens.
- Reliable Data Transmission: With built-in checkpointing for uninterrupted data transmission, NeuronEX pushed data to Azure EventHub, ensuring complete and accurate data delivery.
- Cloud-Edge Collaborative Management: EMQX ECP’s cloud-edge collaboration allowed centralized, life-cycle management of NeuronEX devices across all 50 production sites. This enabled unified remote configuration, monitoring, and real-time anomaly detection, ensuring reliable system performance.
- Enhanced Security: By integrating with Azure’s authentication framework, EMQX ECP’s SSO function provided secure, user-friendly access, significantly boosting system security and ease of use.
Results
Implementing EMQ’s solution delivered substantial benefits for the beverage giant’s production operations:
- Data Interoperability: By breaking down data silos, the company achieved unified data collection, management, and sharing across facilities, creating a solid foundation for intelligent decision-making.
- Real-Time Visibility: Key performance indicators in the production process were monitored in real time, allowing managers to gain insights into production status and make timely adjustments.
- Cost Reduction: Remote monitoring and management of equipment and production systems lowered maintenance costs, while significantly reducing unexpected downtime.
- Agility in Response: The digital system empowered the company to adapt more swiftly to market changes, reducing time-to-market for new products.
Conclusion
Through its strategic partnership with EMQ, this leading beverage company not only improved operational efficiency and product quality but also laid a robust foundation for future smart manufacturing initiatives. The flexible deployment, powerful data processing, and cloud-edge collaborative management of EMQ’s solution enabled the company to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market.