Dell manufacturing facilities refine quality-control and streamline productivity with Edge Gateways
Dell Inc is helping new customers across the globe, as well as its own manufacturing facilities, to future proof their businesses through embracing IoT technology. New customers span a broad range of industries, from building and industrial automation to video surveillance and security, and include global automation technology provider Emerson; energy management software provider Talisen Technologies; video surveillance experts Innodep; and ICT research and innovation organization TSSG. Additionally, Dell is deploying its Edge Gateways across several manufacturing facilities after seeing productivity improvements during recent proof of concepts in Brazil.
According to a new report published by Dell Technologies and the Institute for the Future (IFTF), emerging technologies such as IoT, along with massive advancements in software, big data and processing power, will reshape society. In 2030 every organization will be a technology organization and, as a result, businesses need to start thinking now about how to prepare their infrastructure for digital transformation.
“We’re committed to helping customers build the right IoT solutions to address their unique business needs,” said Rajesh Janey, President & MD, Enterprise, Dell EMC. “Not only do we offer the industry’s broadest IoT portfolio, but we help customers build upon their existing equipment to help simplify the deployment process and reach their return-on-investment faster.”
Since building a dedicated IoT division in 2015, Dell has helped organizations develop solutions that unlock the data needed to enable faster, useful analysis, greater collaboration and improved productivity. Some of the organizations that have recently chosen Dell to help build their unique, end-to-end IoT solutions, include:
- Chitale Dairy,a dairy farm in Bhilawadi, India, sells around 60 million liters (16 million gallons) of milk annually. From monitoring dairy cow habits and health using IoT sensors to automating and improving milk production through a high-speed, high-availability network, Chitale Dairy is the top of the Indian dairy industry. Everyone wins: the farmers, the company, the community — and, yes, even the cow. Digital transformation helps keep dairy farmers’ most precious livestock healthier and producing at a 10x higher yield, through big data analytics, automated farmer to-do lists and computerized breeding management. This kind of transformation was nearly impossible just a generation ago, and owes itself to a creative and innovative use of technology that helps foster opportunity for the farmers around them. Chitale Dairy drives dairy production supporting 50,000 farmers and 200,000 cows. Chitale’s focus on animal health and scalable productivity is boosting the local economy, and creating higher-quality milk products. Chitale Dairy is using Dell EMC Networking and Storage solutions and manageability software from VMware.
- Emerson, a global automation technology provider, offers the go-to solution for chemical, oil and gas, and power companies looking to control flow and pressure in process operations via control valves. However, today’s customers need the ability to utilize control valve data through predictive maintenance and Industrial IoT (IIoT). To address these needs, Emerson worked with Dell to develop a new wireless valve monitoring solution built on Dell Edge Gateways. Additionally, Emerson is developing a control valve condition monitoring service, also based on Dell Edge Gateways.
- Innodep, a South Korea-based provider of security and surveillance software, wanted to extend the success of its Vurix IP-Matrix video security management appliance by capitalizing on the power of IoT. Already built on Dell EMC PowerEdge R730 servers, Innodep worked with Dell EMC OEM and Dell IoT to enable Vurix IP-Matrix’s existing Dell EMC hardware stack by integrating the Dell Edge Gateway 5000 Series. Innodep cut development time by 40% and can now offer customers enhanced building security, greater interoperability, increased performance and simplified support model.
- Talisen Technologies, a Missouri-based software provider, chose Dell EMC OEM Solutions to help develop their IoT solution. Talisen needed a flexible, reliable network edge device to support its Enterprise Sustainability Platform (ESP), a cloud-based building energy management platform hosted inside a datacenter infrastructure. As a result, the company deployed the Dell Embedded Box PC 3000 and worked with Dell EMC OEM to help bring its ESP gateway to market on a global scale. Now Talisen can offer its customers a compact, reliable gateway solution that better supports accurate and robust Big Data analytics capabilities delivered from a scalable and intelligent converged infrastructure.
- TSSG, an Ireland-based, internationally recognized center of excellence for information and communication technologies research (ICT) and innovation, was looking to develop a world-class IoT testing environment to expedite IoT research access to key verticals in the Irish economy. Building on an existing close and positive relationship with the center, Dell EMC offered best-in-class infrastructure solutions and IoT expertise to deliver an on-campus, multi-protocol, multi-domain IoT testing environment for academic and industry based researchers. With the test environment, TSSG will be able to produce higher quality IoT-driven research to support vertical projects that are pivotal to the Irish economy, such as proof-of-concept designs for agricultural applications. The chosen IoT testing environment consists of Dell EMC PowerEdge R730xd, R730and R630 with Dell Edge Gateways.
Additionally, Dell has replicated similar success within its own factories. Recently, Dell’s factory in Brazil streamlined quality-control in the production line with IoT. The mass customization offered by Dell’s build-to-order model posed a fundamental challenge for quality control – variability. To overcome this issue, the factory developed “Smart EQM,” or End-of-the-line Quality Metric, an IoT-enabled solution based on the Dell Edge Gateway 5100 that uses the power of real-time analytic capabilities.
Today, Smart EQM has greatly refined the factory’s quality-control sampling precision, allowing them to increase Quality team productivity and reduce cycle time. Other benefits include:
- Boosts EQM platform coverage by 34%
- Reduces EQM cycle time by 15%
- Raises Quality team productivity by 20%
- Refines quality-control sampling precision
- Increases sampling flexibility via real-time data
- Offers a scalable, global quality-control model
