Hitachi Vantara Enhances Lumada Portfolio to Deliver Improved Resilience, Agility and Accuracy in Industrial IoT Environments

By STS News Desk On May 4, 2021

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Hitachi Vantara, the digital infrastructure, data management, and digital solutions subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today announced advancements to the Lumada software platform and industry solutions to accelerate the digital transformation of industrial processes. These offerings help deliver real-time, actionable insights that accelerate the ability to predict problem areas, streamline production and maintenance, and create a connected supply chain – resulting in enhanced operational efficiency, minimal revenue disruptions, and product quality improvements.

Improving manufacturing operational outcomes involves comprehensive data analysis and integration from thousands of moving parts across remote and industrial environments. Lumada is Hitachi’s digital platform that connects data, assets, and people to fuel industry innovation. It is the software foundation for Lumada Industry Solutions, that extract data-driven insight and drive better operational and business outcomes. The updated Lumada portfolio allows customers to automate tasks and make faster decisions by training data models in the cloud and deploying them to edge devices, creating actionable insights from diverse data sets at lower infrastructure cost.

“Across the globe, industries are dealing with increasing complexity, a faster changing environment and greater competition that together are driving a need for accelerated digitalization. Supply chain disruptions, health and safety measures and operational challenges have highlighted this need for data-driven innovation,” said, Radhika Krishnan, Chief Product Officer, Hitachi Vantara. “Today’s advancements allow our customers to make faster, more informed decisions so industries can thrive in our rapidly digitalizing future.”

Delivering Deeper Insights and Faster Time to Value
Hitachi Vantara is accelerating industrial digitalization with major enhancements to data-driven offerings for manufacturing, extending AI and automation from edge to core, and delivering deep real-time insights from new combinations of data and connections.

- Lumada Manufacturing Insights:
  - This industry solution delivers greater visibility across a customers’ supply chain subsystems with the supply chain module’s ability to implement supply chain control tower solutions and take direct, demand-driven action.
  - Integrating and correlating data from multiple sources– from asset health data to vibration, video, lidar and audio – to detect potential failure of a machine, manufacturers can better predict points of failure and perform preventive maintenance, reducing downtime and improving output.
  - Also new is the ability to automate forms for digitization of factory floor processes – a practice that is still largely done with pen, paper and spreadsheets – to establish ‘if this, then that’ protocols across manufacturing processes.
  - Lumada Manufacturing Insights is now also available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace for easier integration with Microsoft cloud environments.
- Smart Spaces & Lumada Video Insights:
  - These industry solutions leverage new workflow automation within Hitachi Visualization Suite and a mobile application for improved team collaboration and incident response.
  - An expanded Hitachi Edge Gateway portfolio includes industry-tailored and “ruggedized” versions that allow for data integration from sources such as trains, industrial spaces, or first responder vehicles and equipment, and includes higher compute power at the edge with CPU or GPU options to enable new outcomes, and make faster, more data-driven decisions.
  - Sensor fusion creates the ability to co-analyze video, lidar, and other data to enable new use cases such as quality assurance and analysis of human-machine interaction, while improving accuracy.
- Lumada Edge Intelligence:
  - Integration between the Lumada software platform and Google Cloud allows customers to speedup data preparation by adjusting resources on-demand and combining multiple data types for better insights.
  - Updates to Lumada Edge Intelligence also simplify Machine Learning workflows by pushing models to edge devices for faster automated decision-making without reliance on point tools.
  - New APIs for edge management and data access allow reuse of assets, gateways, and software to create integrated solutions utilizing existing infrastructure.

“Meat & Livestock Australia has been collaborating with Hitachi Vantara on a number of digital projects over the past five years leading up to our latest project, the Connected Beef Supply Chain Control Tower,” says Dr. Nigel Tomkins, program manager, grassfed productivity at Meat & Livestock Australia. “Hitachi Vantara’s Lumada Manufacturing Insights has allowed our industry to integrate both sensor and system data to provide insights across the supply chain—this has led to improved productivity and quality outcomes. We look forward to leveraging the capabilities of the Supply Chain Control Tower even further—gaining insight on factors impacting supply and consumer demand.”

“Our industry is experiencing rapid digitalization and a distinct increase in the pace of business. This underscores the need for more agility and predictability in everything we do and what we deliver to our customers,” says Petra Sundström, VP & Head of Digital Offering, Sandvik Rock Processing at industrial manufacturer Sandvik. “We’re collaborating with Hitachi to innovate our business models. With Lumada Manufacturing Insights, we are now able to offer predictive maintenance as a service–delivering the outcomes our customers are looking for in this digital era.”

“For manufacturers to get real end-to-end benefits from data-driven solutions, it’s important to focus not only on the obvious areas of production. Other data sources and solutions beyond the factory floor should also be looked at. For example, use video analytics to study material flow from receiving dock to warehouse to shop floor; use lidar to monitor employee movements from a safety perspective. There are so many ways to use this technology, and the applications become more apparent as the team familiarizes with the sensors and analytics,” says Allen Ahlert, senior director, Engineering with Hitachi Computer Products (America), Inc. which leverages Lumada solutions at its 352,000 sq. ft manufacturing and supply facility in Norman, OK. “Hitachi Vantara has been able to approach this holistically beyond what point solutions can do to create comprehensive, rich insights across facilities and processes.”

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