Quality is one of the most important functional areas in industry, as they have responsibility on product quality and traceability of production. They can drive initiatives to improve customer satisfaction, reduce waste, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Ibisa can work together with Quality areas to design and implement digital experiences that improve the key indicators in these three important aspects:

• Client satisfaction.
• Reduction of product give-away.
• Compliance of regulatory and internal requirements.
• Traceability of product and production batch records.

Industry 4.0 is the natural evolution of operational technologies (OT), after steam, electricity and automation. Technologies based on the Industrial Internet of Things are promising enormous potential for production plants, but it is not always easy to figure out, how to start. Ibisa has defined a clear abstraction about the transformation process faced by production processes and plants.

We have delivered projects that delivered significant benefits:

• Cost reduction (OPEX) of up to 3,6% annually.
• Productivity increases that augment output by 2,9%.

How can we help to achieve these benefits?

In all our projects, PEOPLE always come first. Why do we put this focus? Because every successful transformation is a result of engaging people. And your people also will promote change when they fully understand their benefit of changing something that might have been in place for years. Only if companies take the benefit-to-people approach seriously, Digital Transformation and the adoption of new technologies will advance. And this is why Ibisa applies a people-centered approach with simple, easy-to-use solutions to build upon the ideas of the people.

We build solutions around people by understanding the Triangle of Digital Transformation: People, Assets (Things), and Processes. When implementing the ibisa platform we redesign the relationship between these three entities, trying to promote anticipation of critical events, collaboration between people and areas and monitoring processes and business rules:

• People shall be enabled to ANTICIPATE critical events in order to take action
• People will be able to COLLABORATE with co-workers and assets in order to optimize processes and to guarantee business rules and standards
• People will be provided the information necessary to EXECUTE actions wherever it is necessary.

Taking action is fundamental for us. All Industry 4.0 solutions are capable of connecting, measuring and tracking of operations. Our value proposition goes further: We help to trigger the Action. The ibisa platform should serve those who must assume responsibility in the plant.

Maintenance of assets is facing great challenges every day. Uncertainty is a key success factor here. Ibisa can help by managing critical events before they occur: Anticipation and data-based predictions will improve operational continuity. Opportunities include:

Condition-based maintenance – CBM. Using real-time and online data, it permits to replace calendar-based maintenance with a schedule based on the operating conditions of an asset, such as hour meters, vibrations, temperatures, and others. Ibisa can easily help to provide real-time online asset data to existing maintenance applications.

Integration with ERP / MRP: Ibisa helps to simplify the exchange of information between technical staff and the existing IT/OT landscape, as all relevant manual activities can be reported from a mobile device with an easy-to-use interface to existing maintenance applications.

Collaboration across functional areas: Collaboration components help coordinate teams and assign responsibilities. Ibisa helps to execute workflows between production cells, technicians, maintenance supervisor and plant management, to make sure that incidents are attended according to procedures. This way, attendance times will be monitored and improved, and service levels fulfillment will be secured.

Predictive Maintenance: The data generated by critical assets can be used for the modeling of algorithms in languages ​​such as R or Python. These algorithms help anticipating and optimizing preventive maintenance programs. They can be focused on questions such as: possible failures by components of a critical asset, optimization of the MP plan, optimization curves of operations, among others.

Both IT and operation areas have become the drivers of the industrial digital transformation, via technologies such as IIoT, Cloud, mobility and collaboration. Ibisa was born after years of experience in operational technologies “OT” and has also worked hand in hand with IT leaders to understand their needs, concerns and challenges regarding integration of IT and OT. Ibisa empowers the governance and democratization of OT data, the IT / OT convergence. Ibisa implementations normally are joint initiatives between areas such as maintenance, production, quality and continuous improvement via:

• Establishing governance and democratization programs for OT data.
• Enabling flexible architectures between datacenter, cloud and hybrid.
• Generating Paperless operations.
• Integrating automatic data into ERP, MRP, quality software and production planning.
• Providing operations analytics.
• Designing and implementing digital experiences

Companies with multiple, geographically dispersed production centers face certain challenges in starting their digital transformation programs. Ibisa has collaborated with these organizations to create programs that help them in the following way:

Standardization across locations: Standardizing and unifying contextual information for each production centers is a great challenge but required to make data on production, inventories, production indicator, etc. comparable between plants. Only after standardization is achieved, reporting to the corporate level can be truly efficient.

Compliance with corporate procedures and manuals: Derived from the needs of standardization, large organizations have invested significant efforts in the creation of corporate manuals and procedures that are mandatory for all their production centers. However, compliance with these procedures requires a high demand for human supervision, for ongoing training and enforcement after updates. Ibisa simplifies this dramatically, as manual procedures are transformed into digital workflows that are driving standardization.

Reliable measurement of all production centers: Organizations seek to have a reliable and fair measurement for their different production centers in terms of efficiency, production, waste and consumption, etc. However, these measurements are often the results of manual forms, susceptible to error and interpretation. Digitizing data flows might be the answer designed at the corporate level to impose a standardized measurement of the indicators.

Cybersecurity and OT data Governance: Large organizations should have strict cybersecurity and data governance policies. Industry 4.0 platforms like ibisa should be based on a very flexible solution architectures that allows to be tailored to any scenario, including distributed, datacenter, cloud and hybrid architectures.

Compliance with cybersecurity policies when implementing Industry 4.0 platforms requires dealing with legacy infrastructures and OT and their respective demilitarized zones and firewalls. Ibisa handles these requirements as it is designed to function at the Edge within operational networks and allows the OT and IT networks to be decoupled. Ibisa features state of the art cybersecurity practices such as encryption, tokens, device harvesting, in well-known HTTPS protocols that allow the data traffic to be parameterized safely between demilitarized zones and firewalls.