Unlocking the Boundless Potential of IoT and ML

Industry 4.0 is transforming the way manufacturing organizations work; however, there is a big gap in moving to industry 4.0 and harnessing the advantage of the same. In order to manage manufacturing environmental performance, detail component and material information is required. Acquiring these data and analyzing them to gain meaningful insights to optimize their efficiency has been a great challenge for manufacturers. Coupled with this, the cost of upgrading and switching from legacy to new machine is also creating a ripple in the industry. A greater agony, however, lies in attaining overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), availability, performance, and quality KPIs from the machines on their factory floors. To mitigate these challenges, GEM, a California-based company comes up with a cloud-based Precare platform that enables manufacturers to migrate and upgrade industrial systems efficiently and cost effectively while harnessing the complete benefits of smart factory automation. “Our ultimate mission is to create world‐class products and services that provide enterprises and users with mission critical data, insights and decision making tools through the use of IoT and Machine Learning,” begins Gal Garniek, President & CEO of GEM.

Having worked in the network and data infrastructure space for more than two decades, Garniek notes “The KPIs are extremely useful in understanding how the problems in manufacturing lines negatively affect machine availability, performance and output quality.” GEM is dedicated to improving the experience, productivity, quality, security of manufacturing enterprises and individuals by means of a platform that tightly couples services as needed, enabling them to provide a complete migration solution.

GEM’s Precare platform has the capability of adding Industry 4.0 data acquisition and predictive analytics to any factory floor within 24 hours of engagement. With this real‐time data acquisition ability, acquiring the MTBF and MTBA data from the factory floors is no more backbreaking for the manufacturers. “Our core strength lies in the ability to create scalable frameworks around extraction of mission critical data from any machine and analyzing them,” states Garniek. This allows manufacturers to compile important KPIs, such as OEE, availability, performance, quality, and just‐in‐time maintenance prediction, faster and more accurately.

GEM offers six key Precare products—Edge, Cloud, KPIs, Predictive maintenance (PdM), Dashboards, and Reports—on its platform. The Precare Edge facilitates digital twin representation of machines, data acquisition, complex edge processing, machine vision, and predictive analytics at the edge. For storage and retrieval of machine data and computation of KPIs, GEM’s Precare Cloud is the ultimate panacea. With Precare KPIs, the company provides real-time insight into OEE, availability, performance, quality, MTBF, and MTBA with drill‐down from the corporate level to the machine. For high accuracy prediction of machine failures, GEM offers the manufacturers with its Precare PdM that can pre-process, extract features of, train, validate, and select the optimal ML model. The company’s dashboard provides a clear and functional presentation of statuses, alarms, trends, KPIs, and reports which in turn provide standard and custom formatted data with extensive sets of filters and can be scheduled to run automatically.

Furthermore, from a financial standpoint, GEM offers capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) savings. The company’s real-time data acquisition off legacy machines prevents the CAPEX for new machines, while the transparent connectivity and no operational training requirement cuts down the OPEX. GEM’s rolled up KPIs provide C‐suite executives with real‐time corporate level insights, while KPIs at the factory floor, machine and event levels provide managers, operators, and engineering with real‐time insights down to the most detailed level of the equipment.

GEM offers Precare platform across various sectors, among which semiconductor manufacturing industry is at the core of the company’s operations, even today. Back in the day, a semiconductor manufacturer lacked the visibility at every level on KPIs. The firm unnecessarily invested heavily as CAPEX and OPEX for upgrading to newer equipment. Deploying of GEM Precare agents created digital twins for the factory machines enabling the manufacturer to extend the useful life and ROI of his machines. With GEM’s solution, the manufacturer gained 100 percent automated visibility into real‐time KPI data while successfully eliminating human errors and saving manpower. The manufacturer faced a 20 percent increase in availability, the associated gross margin, and ROI leveraging GEM’s accurate OEE availability analytics.

The experience gained from semiconductor manufacturing industry, and tools developed for KPIs are highly transferrable to other industries; hence, GEM’s next growth step is to expand into industries of electronics, plastics, and heavy manufacturing. Augmenting automatic data collection with manual data entry is what makes GEM stand out from its competitors. “By delivering rich technology stacks, agility and consistently high level of service to our customers and partners allow us to organically expand within existing customer accounts and address new customer opportunities,” concludes Garniek.