Hitachi Vantara expands digital manufacturing portfolio

Hitachi Vantara, the digital infrastructure and solutions subsidiary of Hitachi is launching an expanded set of offerings to help manufacturers accelerate manufacturing 4.0 initiatives and to assist with safely restarting production in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For many manufacturers, the pandemic has not only affected worker health and safety, it has impacted demand, interrupted production, exposed vulnerabilities in supply chains, and driven an urgent need to modernise operations.

Dramatic variations in production capacity and demand illustrate the new stresses being placed on manufacturing supply chains and production planning.

Hitachi Vantara's new manufacturing practice and its expanded portfolio of digital manufacturing solutions, services and consulting services aim to help manufacturers adapt to these immediate challenges and help manufacturers lay the foundations for the digitalisation of health, safety and environment (HS-E), asset insights, predictive quality, and operations optimisation.

"The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing a litany of challenges for manufacturers that highlight how important unlocking data and digital industrial innovation is to the industry's future," says Hitachi Vantara manufacturing practice general manager James Destro.

"With our powerful IT and OT experience, Hitachi Vantara can uniquely inspire, envision, architect and accelerate digital transformation that solves today's challenges and prepares manufacturers for the challenges of tomorrow.

The expanded portfolio of digital solutions includes health, safety and environment solutions leveraging Lumada Video Insights technologies which can be used for applications such as elevated body temperature identification and hand-washing detection.

Thermal cameras and lidar technology can detect the temperature of a person from a distance so that workers can be screened non-intrusively for symptoms of COVID-19 and workspaces can be monitored for compliance with distancing recommendations.

Hitachi Vantara is also expanding Lumada Manufacturing Insights solutions with new domains that help manufacturers address health, safety and environment, supply chain optimisation, asset insights, predictive quality, and operations optimisation.

Lumada Manufacturing Insights is a portfolio of industrial internet-of-things (IoT) solutions that empowers manufacturers to improve operations through data-driven insights.

The portfolio delivers benefits such as improved overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), superior operations efficiency, and product quality optimisation through predictive and prescriptive insights.

The new solutions introduced today, coupled to Hitachi Vantara's advisory and consulting services, enable manufacturers to connect production floor Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to create a "digital thread" that provides complete visibility into the data of the organisation.

"The COVID-19 pandemic presents a number of significant challenges for global manufacturers, from ensuring safety for their workers, to supporting new regulatory compliance, to managing and maintaining a strong supply chain and solving for logistics," says Omida Research industrial software associate director Fabio Raffo.

"As they grapple with operating in the new normal, transformative digital solutions can help to provide significant ROI and play an integral role in helping them to not only solve for and overcome these challenges – but thrive – while providing a foundation for future innovation.