Thorsten Cleve: "We can already show existing scalable reference implementations for the most important tasks in the manufacturing industry."

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The task of the industry initiative is to develop repeatable reference implementations of frequently required industry use cases for corporate customers. To this end, experts from Microsoft Industry Solutions Consulting visit the customers together with the partners and implement the new solutions there. "This special service is also available for small and medium-sized companies in the manufacturing industry," emphasizes Thorsten Cleve, Director Manufacturing, Chemicals & Lifescience at Microsoft Germany.
The benefit for customers, according to Cleve: "Reliable and scalable reference implementations for the most important tasks in the manufacturing industry are already available and can be used immediately. They therefore only require a low initial investment and lead to a quick return on investment. They also allow new IIoT business models to be implemented much more quickly: "Digital transformation works best when we manage it together and the best solutions can prevail. This will ensure greater efficiency and sustainability throughout the industry."
The approach of Microsoft Germany and its partners is in line with the results of the IDC study 'Industrial IoT in Germany 2021'. "In an industry comparison, manufacturing companies lead the field when it comes to IIoT applications," explains study author Marco Becker, Senior Consultant at IDC Germany. "Use cases from the areas of remote maintenance and control as well as production planning and supply chain management are of particular interest to manufacturing companies. Easily transferable references make it easy for users to transfer and expand their own traditional business model to new variants. Their development therefore offers a real competitive advantage."

Ten popular scenarios

Partner solutions already exist for ten use cases as part of the initiative: These cases relate to automatic quality control, determining Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE), creating process information management systems, anomaly detection, vibration monitoring, condition monitoring, determining energy consumption, the use of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV), waste management and bottleneck analysis.

In addition, Microsoft is currently developing further solutions with its partners for tasks such as remote assist, asset connectivity, production planning and optimization or the basic provision of a data platform.

The partners

According to Cleve, the spectrum of partners ranges "from global consulting companies and highly specialized technology experts to contacts for smaller SMEs." The partners include Accenture, All for One, AVEVA, CloudRAIL, Crate.io, DnA Industry Solutions, EY, ITA Academy GmbH, o9 Solutions, PTC, PwC, Robotron, Sight Machine and TTTech Industrial.