IIoT and AI specialist Webee has launched a no-code turnkey IIoT platform for manufacturing. Webee SmartFactory is designed to connect operations in minutes without the need for technical expertise and can cut industrial IoT deployment time from months to days.

Webee argues that coding-centric solutions for connected manufacturing can create logistical barriers and technical talent gaps that impede manufacturers from moving IIoT projects from proof of concept to production quickly enough to achieve success. 

Webee SmartFactory aims to enable industrial manufacturing enterprises to reach production status of IIoT applications 10 times faster and start realizing ROI right away. Its integration with existing infrastructure and compatibility with heterogeneous data sources is especially beneficial in factory settings, according to Webee.

The company’s Visual Designer does not require coding or technical expertise. It enables production line and business users to easily create customized dashboards and IoT applications to aggregate and process heterogeneous industrial sensor data and any relevant third-party data sources to surface actionable insights in real time.

“The last thing customers want is someone interfering with their production lines, so having the ability to access real-time manufacturing data through Webee’s non-intrusive approach is a big win,” said Paul Nashawaty, Senior Analyst at ESG. “Gaining insights from IoT-created data should be as easy as typing a question into Google. Webee’s AI analytics engine has the ability to empower its customers to do exactly that and has been shown to rapidly produce insights no matter the amount of data being processed.”

Webee SmartFactory allows users to observe relevant information about manufacturing status and factory productivity on one screen and make necessary maintenance decisions based on real-time insights. The platform also includes various pre-built modules for connected manufacturing applications and measurements.

An NLP-powered search function permits anyone to type in a question in natural language to ask for insights about or to identify problems with any manufacturing operations being monitored. They receive a response – in natural language – that pulls from all relevant data, dynamically surfacing insights tailored to the user asking the question. Data is aggregated from multiple sources in real time, so the user is able to obtain end-to-end visibility with a non-intrusive approach and take corrective action as needed.

Webee founder and CEO Lucas Funes said, “Webee SmartFactory eliminates the need for a costly hiring spree by providing an IoT solution that works out of the box, for a multitude of use cases. Our flexible platform also allows customers to make quick changes and adjustments on the go. It’s a necessary change from how things have been done until now.”

According to Webee, SmartFactory is broadly applicable, from standalone manufacturing operations to large multinationals at any scale. Prior to implementing Webee, a Fortune 50 multinational Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) leader relied on a manual, scattershot approach for pulling operational information related to their plants and laboratories. With Webee, they access multiple dashboards centrally and generate data visualizations that give them the insights they need about all elements of production and manufacturing cycles in real time. Leveraging battery powered, long-range LoRa devices connected through a LoRaWAN network they are able to gain visibility from non-connected machines to alert plant managers about production bottlenecks and machine maintenance needs. They now receive instant alerts that eliminate product losses and give them visibility. Webee has also made it easy for them to replicate processes and normalize monitoring across their factories around the world, which is particularly useful when they acquire new companies with different operations.

A 2020 Beecham Research study found that 50% of companies across industries failed to take IoT initiatives past proof of concept because of the sheer complexity of implementing IoT solution components. And in Microsoft’s 2020 IoT Signals report, 28% of organizations polled cited budget as a barrier to further IoT adoption and 26% cited lack of technical knowledge.

“The biggest problem with industrial manufacturing IoT implementations is that they’re too complex,” Funes continued. “You need engineers who understand how to extract data and put it into a database. You need data scientists skilled in processing data. You need programmers who can write code for APIs or to send SMS or emails to notify the business that the temperature of a given machine in a facility needs to be adjusted to avoid downtime and improve efficiency. Then you need to put all these pieces together. This is all expensive and takes too much time. There has to be a better way. This is why we purpose-built the Webee SmartFactory platform.”

Webee’s patented smart object recognition and anomaly detection technologies work in concert with its search-driven AI analytics to drive granular diagnostics of complex industrial manufacturing systems in real time.