Discover how the HPE GreenLake Flex Solution built for Smart Manufacturing Execution System boosts manufacturing efficiency, leverages AI for predictive insights, and empowers businesses to streamline production from order to delivery—driving real transformation.
Does it matter which day of the week your car was produced? The answer may be surprising.
Variables such as “day of the week” can impact production outcomes. Implementing AI technologies to produce insights based on these factors can help manufacturers make progress towards goals of decreasing costs while sustaining the high quality of outputs and increasing efficiency.
HPE GreenLake Flex Solution built for Smart Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is a streamlined, high availability solution from HPE and abat that provides visibility and control over a company’s global manufacturing landscapes. From the moment an order is received to delivery of the final product, processes and progress are tracked and analyzed.
In addition to industry-leading AI capabilities, the solution has a cloud-like operational structure that enables as-a-service-like deployments of MES resources. Learn more about the solution in this two-minute overview video:
Trends in the manufacturing industry
Manufacturing can help organizations achieve a competitive advantage if treated as a strategic priority, says Lorenzo Veronesi, associate director for manufacturing insights at IDC. "Today, companies are going through a massive cultural change, with manufacturing operations transforming from key enablers of the fulfillment process to key enablers of business transformation and business reinvention." [1]
This statement reflects how manufacturers need to be increasingly intentional about their production processes, especially when considering how to implement new technologies. It aligns with shifts in the discrete manufacturing industry towards optimizing production processes to create products with shorter innovation cycles at lower costs and with higher quality.
With discrete manufacturing, individual items are assembled from separate components. Oftentimes, products are complex and personalized based on specific customer orders. In contrast, process manufacturing involves ingredients that are combined and unidentifiable as their piece parts. Common examples of process manufacturing include food, chemical, or pharmaceutical products.
One example of discrete manufacturing is automotive production, which embodies many industry challenges as well. Cars are expensive, so customers are expecting to experience premium quality and superior price/performance ratio. Plus, cars are customizable, so manufacturers must adjust production procedures and ensure orders are made correctly. To add to the challenge, innovation cycles are getting shorter and shorter; auto manufacturers must accommodate accordingly. Production also occurs at a growing number of global sites with an increasing number of suppliers. Facing these demands and challenges, manufacturers need a streamlined solution to help them maintain an agile, controlled, and efficient production environment.
Building a “factory of the future” with HPE and abat
Cue the HPE GreenLake Flex Solution built for Smart Manufacturing Execution System, developed through a partnership between HPE and abat. The solution consolidates customers’ global manufacturing across production plants into just one system—a single high-performance, massively scalable platform with a high level of availability, continuous and seamless production control, and easy integration into their existing manufacturing system landscapes. It is based on abat’s PLUS and HPE NonStop, consumed through a scalable pay-per-use model, and managed through HPE GreenLake cloud.
PLUS is a production management and control system from abat that helps manufacturers of complex products simplify and manage their geographically distributed, cross-plant production chains—covering planning, logistics, and production tasks. For example, PLUS supports customers with optimizing their production sequence, integrating new product variants with system parametrization, generating modern, workstation- and product-specific visualizations, and conducting in-line quality management. PLUS also helps customers enact more sustainable practices by enabling paperless production as well as reuse of the same production line to produce different variants of vehicles.
HPE NonStop provides a powerful, mission-critical foundation to meet demands for reliability and high availability in production-critical areas. The system is designed with built-in clustering and workload balancing to enable withstanding single points of failure and deliver fault tolerance. This means that customers have minimal unplanned downtime, thus decreasing work disruptions and customer impact.
Additionally, HPE GreenLake cloud offers organizations fast time to value, simplified management and the flexibility to consume IT resources as-a-service, enabling customers to build hybrid cloud environments with a cloud operating model. Together, this solution helps keep your manufacturing environment at the forefront of innovation, efficiency, and customization.
AI use cases in manufacturing
For the record, cars produced on Thursday evening have the most failures. This is contrary to many people’s predictions that a “Monday car” would be the one with the most failures. This topic was discussed at a smart manufacturing panel session at HPE Barcelona Discover 2024 with Casey Taylor (VP & GM, HPE NonStop Solutions), Peter Grendel (CEO & Co-Founder, abat+ GmbH), and Valerie Da Fonseca (Sr. Director, WW HPE GreenLake Solution Sales).
The session discusses AI use cases in manufacturing, such as how AI features can help predict top issues that may occur for a specific vehicle by considering inputs including humidity, outside precipitation, day of the week, and more. The session also discusses how AI features can help with production sequencing and planning, as well as other examples of discrete manufacturing that the solution can support besides automobiles, including kitchen cabinets, washing machines, and windows. Watch the session recording to learn more.
Other AI capabilities in this solution include:
- Manufacturing analytics tool UX that supports the entire factoring process and combines operations, machine, and process data
- Automated inventory with drones and AI
- Neuroscience-based multimodal worker guidance for attention steering and station control; graphical user interface (human-computer interaction)
- Predictive maintenance with automatic initiation of necessary repairs or maintenance to reduce service costs or downtime
- Simulation of construction part routing (combinatorial graph of decision points and conveyer)
- Machine reading of any document OCR using natural language processing (NLP)
Next steps
"It is important to note that equipment and technology do not make as much difference as the ability to use information effectively to support business processes," says IDC's Mr. Veronesi. [2] The HPE GreenLake Flex Solution built for Smart Manufacturing Execution System seeks to combine innovative technologies with manufacturing experience and expertise to help customers attain tangible efficiency and quality gains.
Learn more about the solution with this solution brief.
Evelyn is a product marketer focused on high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. She previously performed product, content, and digital marketing roles in the technology industry, honing her ability to design and execute engaging campaigns as well as work effectively on cross-functional teams. Evelyn attended the University of Southern California and is based in San Jose, California.
[1] IDC, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Smart Manufacturing Strategy Service Providers 2023-2024 Vendor Assessment, December 2023, https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US49759723
[2] IDC, IDC MaturityScape: Smart Manufacturing 3.0, December 2024, https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US51707224
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