According to McKinsey, by consistently leveraging the value of industrial data (product and production data) manufacturers can reduce downtime by 30-50%, increase productivity by up to 30%, and increase earnings by up to 55%. For example, Volkswagen has a goal to boost productivity by 30% across 122 factories by leveraging Amazon Web Services to build their industrial cloud. Those numbers are game changing, but require you to extract the data from your Operational Technology (OT) systems and analyze it to improve operations. Customers have told us that having a near real-time visibility of industrial data is 5%-10% improvement in the productivity of plant managers. 
As a result, we’ve designed the AWS IoT Connected Factory Solution to help manufacturers modernize their operations. Customers do not have to invest significantly in data collection that is considered undifferentiated heavy lifting. Second, customers are able to collect, organize, and store their industrial data in AWS in an operational data store for hot data and an industrial date lake for warm/cold data, as well as define virtual assets and asset hierarchies to provide structure and context to the data. Third, with this streamlined data collection process, customers are able to recognize immediate business value though visualization of their operational metrics from all sources of data. Fourth, they receive a deployment framework to be able to roll out the offering across all their factory lines and plants. Lastly with this data organized in AWS, customers can accelerate their industry 4.0 journey and achieve business outcomes like predictive maintenance, predictive quality, and remote asset management.
More and more enterprise companies are modernizing their manufacturing operations with AWS. While every company is different, and some will feel comfortable to tackle these challenges on their own, most of the companies we work with are looking for help. Some companies lack deep knowledge with the AWS platform to design the right architecture, don’t have enough resources to implement it, lack the technological breadth to integrate with all their enterprise systems, need help to create engaging user interfaces and experience, or are not staffed to operate their solution globally around the clock.
The AWS IoT Connected Factory Solution brings an ecosystem of partners across hardware, edge software, IIoT consulting, deployment, and industrial solutions that can help customers build and implement applications. Partners are important in this transformation – AWS continues to build an ecosystem of complimentary capabilities to accelerate business outcomes for customers. The ecosystem of partners shown in the image below has the expertise to deliver an end-to-end solution for customers to reduce the complexity of IIoT. These partners leverage the industrial machine connectivity (IMC) kit. The IMC kit includes the hardware and software required to connect a customer’s equipment to the cloud and visualize their data. The kit is designed to enable partners to see real business value from the IIoT solution and deploy a complete production solution that addresses all of their critical use cases. The IMC kit source code is publicly available so partners and customers can have access to the entire code repository and documentation. They can focus on differentiation instead of the infrastructure needed for their IIoT solutions. This minimizes risk, reduces development costs, and drives unique value differentiation.
The AWS IoT Connected Factory Solution accelerates our customers’ journey to optimize operations, reduce the infrastructure heavy lifting, and unlock the value trapped in their data. With this solution, customers get a consistent AWS IoT experience and are able to unlock data to modernize their manufacturing operations and accelerate Industry 4.0 success.
You can start using the Connected Factory Solution right away using the source code in the Github repository, or contact the AWS IoT team to learn more about this solution and how you can use it to transform your manufacturing operations.