AWS has made its industrial IoT data collection and analytics platform AWS IoT SiteWise generally available to industrial customers. The service was first announced in Frankfurt in 2018. It is available to customers in the US, western and central Europe.

Volkswagen Group, Bayer Crop Science, Pentair, and Genie are among industrial customers already using SiteWise.

IoT SiteWise is a managed service that collects data from the plant floor, structures and labels the data, and generates real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to help industrial customers make better, data-driven decisions.

Customers can use SiteWise to monitor operations across facilities, compute industrial performance metrics, create applications that analyse industrial equipment data to prevent costly equipment issues, and reduce gaps in production.

AWS IoT SiteWise is designed to address the cost and complexity of extracting data from thousands of sensors and equipment across different locations. Sensor data is often stored locally in specialised servers that lack a common data format, and retrieving the data and placing it in a format useful for cross-site analysis requires significant developer resources and expertise. Once developers have a data collection pipeline to aggregate data across different pieces of equipment, they still have to attach context, such as the equipment type, facility location, and relationship to other equipment.

SiteWise is designed to help customers overcome such challenges by making it easier to collect data from the plant floor, structure and label the data, and generate real-time metrics.

In SiteWise, customers begin by modelling their industrial equipment, processes, and facilities by adding context, such as equipment type and facility location) to the collected data, and defining common industrial performance metrics such as overall equipment effectiveness and uptime) on top of the data using SiteWise’s built-in library of mathematical functions.

Once a customer’s environment is modelled and their data ingested into AWS, the service automatically computes the metrics at the interval defined by the customer.

Uploaded data and computed metrics are sent to a managed time series database, which is designed to store and retrieve time-stamped data with low latency, making it easier for customers to analyse equipment performance over time.

SiteWise also helps customers create custom web applications without coding to visualise key metrics across end-user devices in near real-time.

Such portable web applications can help customers monitor equipment performance on any web-enabled desktop, tablet, or phone to spot anomalies, helping them reduce waste, make faster decisions, and optimise their plant performance.

“Industrial customers tell us that getting their data into the cloud and using it to understand their operational performance is the biggest opportunity they see when evaluating IoT solutions,” said Dirk Didascalou, Vice President of IoT, AWS. “With SiteWise, industrial customers can now use the power of AWS to collect, organise, and monitor their industrial equipment data at scale. SiteWise will help industrial customers move beyond data collection and enable them to visualise and monitor all their equipment, so they can focus on their main job of optimising their operations.”

In addition to using software running on an edge device, SiteWise provides interfaces for collecting data from modern industrial applications through MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) messages or its Application Programming Interface (APIs). SiteWise is available in the US East (North Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland) AWS regions, with additional regions to be announced. 

German car maker Volkswagen Group is a SiteWise customer.  “Machine data generally has no context when extracted from a machine. To make the data useful, it requires the addition of context through enrichment with other data, labelling, filtering and transforming that data before analysing”, said Dr Roy Sauer, Director Enterprise & Platform Architecture, Volkswagen Group. “With SiteWise we are able to easily ingest manufacturing shop floor data into the cloud, model and organise those different machine assets within our plants, and then visualise operational data from our cylinder production line in a web application.”

Bayer Crop Science is another SiteWise user.  “Visibility of operational metrics across our crop processing sites is critical in helping us identify production bottlenecks and then take corrective actions to increase productivity,” said Peri Subrahmanya, IoT Product Lead, Bayer Crop Science. “Using SiteWise across 9 corn production plants in North America, we collect data from the plant floor, and then measure and analyse Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of our machinery in near real-time to identify production inefficiencies. With SiteWise we are now able to onboard a crop site in less than a few hours instead of a few weeks, which is critical in allowing us to scale the use of SiteWise to other crop sites like soy, in a cost-effective manner.”

Other users identified by AWS include industrial water filtration specialist Pentair and material processing products manufacturer Genie.