Today, discrete manufacturers face many challenges including, but not limited to, maintaining aging infrastructure, managing complex production processes, and enabling and training a changing workforce – all while working to ensure quality and operational efficiency metrics are achieved safely. These challenges are coupled with the need to stay competitive globally. This is pushing manufacturers to automate processes and leverage the vast amounts of data being generated by operations, which means implementing effective, compliant, and secure automation and control systems that can be standardized and scaled across their operations. Then, as new systems and technologies are introduced, employees need to be trained. Competing successfully can be a game of inches, meaning that discrete manufacturers should make incremental improvements to production to drive shorter production turns, improve quality, and maintain safety.
First and foremost, Edge Computing reduces the risk and complexity of OT architectures behind what are already complex production processes by providing a backbone for operations – a secure, low latency, high availability backbone. This ensures that critical applications and data are always available and accessible, minimizing unplanned downtime and simplifying the deployment and management of future solutions. As a result, manufacturers can be more confident in adopting modern applications and processes and scaling them across operations. For example, Edge Computing combined with virtualization native to the platform makes it easier to implement and manage solutions remotely, and allows workloads to be consolidated on a single platform. Edge Computing also delivers high availability and fault tolerance helps manufacturers reliably scale capabilities while reducing the amount of infrastructure needed.