Powering automation through IoT integration and platform development

Our client was looking to enhance its IoT capabilities and streamline its supply chain and manufacturing infrastructure. Leveraging next-gen technology and engineering expertise, Centific helped achieve new levels of data visibility and efficiency.

Our client, an international oilfield products, services, and digital solutions provider, wanted to automate its manufacturing process using IoT capabilities. The client needed a way to improve its operations and supply chain visibility to solve scheduling and tracking challenges, and ensure facilities maintained peak operability.

Engaging Centific for our emerging technology and development expertise, the client asked us to optimize manufacturing and supply chain processes, create a custom IoT framework, develop a dashboard for real-time automation monitoring, and build a new user interface for its ISP platform to upgrade its supply chain and provide better business intelligence.

KEY SUCCESSES

Provided support for BI platform and expanded it to serve over 60,000 users
Implemented DevOps approach resulting in faster release times
Refined manufacturing and supply chain processes to support IoT infrastructure
Developed a dashboard and responsive web apps with mobile-ready capabilities
Leveraged the client’s proprietary industrial cloud platform to create a statistics dashboard for IoT monitoring
Created a user interface to enhance supply chain scheduling, delivery, and tracking

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM SUPPORT

To help our client achieve new business intelligence benchmarks, Centific provided engineering support by creating dedicated, data-enabled resources and implementing ETL tools for analysis, design, and business intelligence delivery. Fully integrated into data discovery and visualization platforms—also created by our team—this enabled our client to quickly grow its platform user base from 0 to 60,000.

Additionally, our engineers worked with the client’s BI Solution Center team to implement a DevOps approach to ensure faster release times and fewer bugs as new features are added.

IOT IMPLEMENTATION

In its China manufacturing facilities, the client used fully automated numerical control machines to deliver high-precision components.

To enable real-time status monitoring and optimization of the manufacturing process, as well as ensure the release of quality products, Centific leveraged the client’s IoT platform to create a dashboard that provided key, detailed information and overviews of part numbers and procedures.

Our team also migrated a complex system of NPI applications to the IoT platform to create a unified platform to manage programs internally.

TECH ASSET UPGRADES

With a geographically distributed technology stack, the client was facing challenges with its global operations management.

By adding built-in, location-based services through the client’s proprietary platform, we organized and streamlined its architectural network using a serial device service. As a result, the client was provided with detailed information and data presentation on every machine, enabling BI analysis of instrument and equipment utilization.

CUSTOM DATA COLLECTION

Connecting equipment in a multi-city network, and collecting and displaying sensor-based information on these machines, presented a significant technical challenge for the client.

Leveraging the IoT platform and computing power of Raspberry Pi, Centific built a custom tech framework for machine sensors, enabling real-time, automated environmental data collection across its network. With additional hardware driver development, our team also enabled the client to control the customized setup using the simplified C language.

MOBILE DATA COLLECTION & MONITORING

The client’s digitally-enabled chemical storage tanks were creating monitoring challenges in the field, where employees struggled with tracking tank health, resulting in the potential for chemical management issues.

Employing our engineering expertise, Centific developers built a responsive, data-driven web app that pushed critical information to the client’s field agent devices via a secure 3G network. With real-time sensor data collection, the app enabled field agents to analyze machine health status, trigger events and alerts, react to alerts instantly, and use historical data for further field analysis.

SUPPLIER PLATFORM DEVELOPMENT

With the client suffering from a lack of supply chain visibility and high-tech scheduling and tracking capabilities, Centific created a multi-language web app to provide inbound supplier support.

Centific also built a user-friendly platform that offered suppliers simplified online scheduling, delivery control and workload calculation, and consolidated tracking into a single system, creating an effective supply management and warehouse workload solution for the client and its suppliers.

RESULTS

Expanding the client’s IoT capabilities resulted in significant improvements in process streamlining and visibility, and provided the framework for application development.

With an upgraded tech stack and the launch of data-driven platforms for suppliers and its manufacturing facilities, Centific enabled the client to collect, monitor, and analyze real-time information to improve business decision-making, support inbound suppliers, and enable mobile management of field assets across the organization.