Factory CONNECT

Create a Unified Namespace for Industrial Data

For data-driven manufacturers who need centralized access to operations information, FACTORY CONNECT provides secure, real-time industrial connectivity for seamless data unification.

Increase Productivity and Efficiency

While manufacturing plants continuously generate thousands of data points, they are still running data analytics on a small, restricted subset of tags. Most tags are inconsistently or incorrectly labeled, and the process to sort through them is most often labor-intensive and time consuming. With Factory CONNECT, you’ll be able to:

• Organize tags by automating the standardization and contextualization of data, which automates data labeling with renaming and error correction.  This is done through Blueprint, which solves the problem of hundreds of unidentified or confusing tags that end up misinterpreted and remain unused.

• Connect directly to assets and data sources to avoid the slow flow of data that is a result of a conventional, multi-hierarchy, ISA-95 data stack.

Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

With the progress of digital transformation through IoT, smart manufacturing, and advanced automation, manufacturers are seeing an increase in cloud consumption as a result. Factory CONNECT helps reduce excess cloud costs through:

• Automation of tag selection selection based on heuristics and feature extraction (enabled by downsample intelligence) selects only relevant data to be transferred, thus reducing cloud costs.

• Feature engineering improves efficiency through the transformation (calculation) of variables from raw data, which also reduces the amount of transferred data - and thus eliminating unnecessary compute and storage costs.

Future-Proof and Mitigate Security Risks 

Manufacturing software must uphold the highest standards of security. Whether it's protecting against operational risk and cyber attacks, or ensuring supply chain security and regulatory compliance, secure operations build trust between partners and customers. Factory CONNECT guarantees secure connection through:

• Nested Edge technology adds an extra layer of security between shop floor assets and the cloud, through a DMZ (demilitarized zone).

• TLS 1.2 compliant encryption protocols guarantee that data being transferred will always be secure.

• Fully integrated with Azure Key Vault, a cloud service that provides a secure store for store keys, passwords, certificates, and other confidential information.

• Centralized container-based deployment management with Microsoft IOT Edge or Siemens Industrial Edge provides for seamless Edge and Cloud deployment.

Minimize Downtime and Build Credibility

Data reliability is fundamental to a successful and efficient plant - each minute of machine downtime can negatively impact OEE and product quality. Count on Factory CONNECT to:

• Always store and forward data to prevent data loss, regardless of unexpected network outages. Rest assured that even PLC and SCADA data will be archived and stored.

• Enable integrated alerts and notifications for active monitoring of the entire process - assets and devices, connectors, and streaming to the cloud.