Powering productivity with cloud at a leading energy company

At a leading energy company's manufacturing shop floor, cycle time was high as employees struggled with legacy enterprise architecture and outdated applications. The company was desperate to modernize to keep employees happy and boost productivity.

Integration was another big issue. The company used more than 20 custom-developed and third-party applications for auditing, repairs, and quality control within on-premises infrastructure. Without integration, it needed many manual interventions to collect and convert data into a usable format. The team also faced challenges with security operations including patching and vulnerability management.

The company also wanted to explore predictive analytics to help employees spot and avoid potential production issues. However, with five outdated reporting systems all collating data in different ways, the company lacked a single source of truth to turn this vision into a reality.

Worse still, employees experienced long wait times to log issues and track production. Calculating productive hours across lines and plants was almost impossible.

As an existing partner, Genpact was primed to help the company modernize its shop floor using our cloud and industrial manufacturing expertise.

Initially, the modernization project focused on IT infrastructure and architecture. However, when we began to examine day-to-day operational activities across applications, processes, and data, we identified ways to redesign and simplify processes across the entire shop floor.

Using these insights, our cloud experts built a migration roadmap for the move to a serverless, cloud-native architecture powered by AWS. We developed an industrial internet of things (IIoT) pipeline to extract data directly from devices and remove the need for manual intervention. We retired redundant processes and consolidated individual applications into industry-specific microservices – reusable across multiple business functions.

Plus, our advanced-level partnership with AWS enabled a smooth migration to support edge computing and workflow orchestration. Today, the solution includes:

• A productivity management tool that enables employees to log issues instantly
• An edge-based solution that connects multiple hardware devices for weighing and measurements and connects harmonics, quality, and auditing processes
• A centralized data and reporting system for use across all sites and plants
• A system that extracts, formats, and streams data from various sources to streamline and rationalize shop floor processes
• Improved AWS security management thanks to security automation, patching, and vulnerability management from AWS

The shop floor modernization project proved a win-win-win for the IT team, employees, and the company as a whole.

As the IT team retired legacy systems, the company realized an initial $1 million cost reduction – which it expects will grow year-over-year. Moving to a serverless, cloud-native architecture has also freed IT from the burden of maintaining on-premises infrastructure.

Shop floor employees now have a one-stop shop for operations. Every process has been redesigned to reduce the number of steps, clicks, and screens involved. Consolidated data and actionable insights are now presented to employees on a single screen in a format that's easy to understand. As a result, employee satisfaction increased along with a 20% boost to shift productivity and a 35% boost to overall shop floor productivity.

With standardized processes across sites, the company has a single source of truth to continuously uncover and act upon data-driven insights. These insights will improve year-over-year cycle times and process improvements.

Moving forward – thanks to the platform – the company will retire the existing applications and migrate more processes to the cloud. Meanwhile, the improved patching and vulnerability management from AWS means productivity continues to reach new heights – without compromising cybersecurity.