Capgemini
Consultancy : Company : Information Technology
Capgemini partners with companies to transform and manage their business by unlocking the value of technology. As a leading strategic partner to companies around the world, we have leveraged technology to enable business transformation for more than 50 years. We address the entire breadth of business needs, from strategy and design to managing operations. To do this, we draw on deep industry expertise and a command of the fast-evolving fields of cloud, data artificial intelligence, connectivity, software, digital engineering, and platforms.
Assembly Line
🏭 Dark factories, bright future?
An automatic (or ‘dark’) factory can be defined as ‘a place where raw materials enter, and finished products leave with little or no human intervention’. One of the earliest descriptions of the automatic factory in fiction was Philip K. Dick’s 1955 short story ’Autofac’, a dystopian and darkly comic scenario in which entirely automated factories threaten to use up the planet’s resources, by continuing to produce things that people don’t need.
Dark factories are a part of the global digital transformation and move to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which is being driven by increasingly capable robotics and automation, AI and 5G connectivity. In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits, challenges, and how companies can move forward with this concept.
It’s also important to consider that fully automated factories have been tried previously, with varying degrees of success. There are a few cautionary tales; IBM tried its own in the 1980s, but closed it because it wasn’t able to respond to changing market needs. Apple also built such a plant in the 1980s, but closed it in the early 90s – likely because the plant was unable to deal with increasingly smaller components. More recently, Tesla walked back some of the automation at its Fremont CA facility, when machines failed to meet its ambitious manufacturing targets. This shows us the importance of flexibility and forward planning.
Transforming industrial crane system automation at Schneider Electric with 5G
Boehringer Ingelheim: Healthy data creates a better world
On the way to the industrial Metaverse
A recent Capgemini Research Institute report explored this potential in more depth; Total Immersion; How immersive experiences and the metaverse benefit customer experience and operations, found that 77% of consumers expect immersive experiences to impact how they interact with people, brands and services, but also that organizations recognize the broad opportunities it presents to drive value across the business, specifically in their internal operations.
As opposed to the static spaces of the consumer metaverse, the dynamic spaces of the industrial metaverse are complex and layered. This ever-evolving reality involves interactions on a deeper, more collaborative level. We suggest the dynamic experiences of the industrial metaverse are best exemplified by the next generation of digital twin technology.
Capgemini and Microsoft collaborate to offer Digital Twin Solutions
Capgemini today announced that it is collaborating with Microsoft to deliver a first-of-its kind, cloud-native, serverless Azure-based digital twin platform, called ReflectIoD. This secure, highly scalable platform will leverage best-in-class architecture and technological components from the Azure suite to help transform an organization’s operations and maintenance efficiency, enabling intelligent industry and driving sustainable business value. It will also enable enterprises to meet the ever-growing needs of standardized brownfields management[1] throughout their life cycle and across ecosystems.
The Growing Need for Private 5G Networks in Manufacturing Plants
Traditionally, data generated from wired & Wi-Fi-based instrumentation devices installed in manufacturing plants are processed either on the local premises or in the public cloud to control the behavior of these devices. Typically, these devices require highly reliable connectivity for quick communications, a latency of less than 1ms, secure data management and data storage, proper traffic isolation between different critical applications running in the factory, and guaranteed QoS for day-to-day operations managed over the private network.
With potentially hundreds of thousands of critical sensors and control systems used in larger factory environments, 5G private network implementations are increasingly finding a way. 5G networks will be powered by massive, distributed computing, located closer to sensors and machines, and capable of applying artificial intelligence and machine/deep learning algorithms to handle huge amounts of industrial and critical data within the factory environment. A 5G factory has a private network design with its own 5G network built in, where 5G devices, RAN, and core are integrated into a complete ecosystem from end-to-end. A private 5G network does not interface with or leverage resources and functionalities from the public 5G MNO network. However, a private 5G frequency is used when a factory creates its own private 5G network, whereas an MNO’s publicly licensed frequency can be used if the MNO builds a private 5G network for a factory. MNOs’ public 5G networks can be used as backup to an existing private 5G network, enabling it to connect all the manufacturing equipment and devices installed in a factory environment to a public 5G network if the private 5G network fails for any reason.