HITACHI VANTARA
Custom Persona-Based Industrial IoT DIGITAL REPORT 2021
Custom Persona-Based Industrial IoT 2
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Hitachi Vantara’s Siddharth Verma and Andrew Mudford discuss the company’s IIoT journey and the benefits of custom, persona-based solutions
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ith experience spanning more than 20 years each, both Siddharth Verma, General Manager Manufacturing Division and Andrew Mudford, Account Director at Hitachi Vantara both began their careers in 2000. Specialising in manufacturing, mining, and technology, these two executives reflect on Hitachi Vantara and its journey since they joined the company. “Hitachi Vantara is a subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd,” begins Verma, “with over 110 years of industrial expertise, and 60 years of IT experience.” “Hitachi is a world leader in areas from manufacturing to automotive to power grids and more, but a lot of how we deliver value is through IT and helping our customers digitally transform their operations for data-driven outcomes,” adds Mudford. “Our particular division is tasked with solutions across the IT spectrum, and a big part of that is trying to empower Hitachi's vision around social innovation and the digital connection of our physical world.
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“Like many companies, we continue to evolve as a business and the key thing for us is that we have strong leadership driving our agenda around the modern connections of people, places and things to discover new insights that drive innovation. We are focused on the core tenets of data, and how you leverage that data to provide insights and value to customers, whether that’s at the underlying IT infrastructure level or targeted insight for specific industries or verticals such as manufacturing or mining.” Hitachi Vantara’s Industrial IoT Journey “Industrial IoT (IIoT) means lots of different things to different people. At its most core for us, IIoT is about understanding the information and data that customers have access to, and how they can get insights from the data?” explains Mudford. 6
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“ Like many companies, we continue to evolve as a business and the key thing for us is that we have strong leadership driving our agenda around the modern connection of people, places and things to discover new insights that drive innovation” ANDREW MUDFORD
HEAD OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT, INDUSTRY SOLUTION PRACTICE, HITACHI VANTARA
“The biggest thing we've found is that customers - depending on what particular part of manufacturing they are operating in - are all at a different stage when it comes
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Improving manufacturing and mining operations with Industrial IoT “Industrial IoT applications can help manufacturers across almost all of their domains. We can create a rich amount of contextual data from what each process is actually doing. What is the process
SIDDHARTH VERMA TITLE: GENERAL MANAGER MANUFACTURING DIVISION LOCATION: CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES Sid leads the IIoT and the Industrial Solutions division for Hitachi Vantara in digital transformation and Industry 4.0 operating models, supply chain control towers, asset performance management, manufacturing operations, and quality and predictive maintenance. Sid helps customers create smart, connected factories and intelligent products. He also manages the industry leading Lumada Manufacturing Insights portfolio of products on behalf of Hitachi Ltd. Previously, Sid led the practice for Siemens Advanta and Deloitte Digital IIoT with a focus on IoT-enabled growth and operation improvement in the Industrial and Energy sectors.
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to digital transformation. Some of our customers are at a more basic level, meaning that they may just want to convert paper and manual processes to digital. At the other end of the spectrum, we're dealing with mature customers, for example in the automotive sector we require more advanced analytics and machine learning type techniques. “The practices that we use have been operating in factories for a long time. Just digitising those allows customers to be a lot more progressive and that's where we start. “We've been on this journey for a little while now, and there's still a long way to go. The industry as a whole is not that digitally mature yet and there are lots of people capable of contributing to digital progress. Some of them are going to be partners, some of them are going to be competitors, and hopefully all of them in some capacity or another are going to be our customers.” Echoing Mudford’s comments, Verma says, “Our biggest challenge is trying to move forward with the capabilities that we have in place and in a format that the client can actually understand and appreciate. Over time options have grown. There are now too many options and vendors. A secondary challenge for us is to differentiate the competition at every step and think about what is and isn’t possible.”
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Hitachi Vantara: Custom, Persona-Based Industrial IoT
“With IoT, our customers can start collecting quality data to help them automatically detect a lot of the defects that were previously only visible by a person or a process at a later stage. It gives them a lot more insight into how a process can be done and on a faster scale. The quality is measured at a much higher speed and a much higher level. One of the biggest use cases in this is around maintenance failures. We can use IoT technologies to reduce catastrophic failure, which means we can predict failures in advance, and the maintenance schedules can be optimised to the way items are used, which will overall reduce the cost for the manufacturer and ensure they meet their commitments,” adds Verma.
“ A lot of solutions at the moment are trying to besqueeze into a one-size-fits-all solution. For us, with persona-based approaches, we can be very targeted when solving problems specific to those industries” ANDREW MUDFORD
HEAD OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT, INDUSTRY SOLUTION PRACTICE, HITACHI VANTARA
contributing? What are people contributing? And once we’re able to see the data across the board, we start to see potential and ask the following questions: What if I changed this product? What if I produce a few more of them? And what will happen if I change this step? What if I do these shifts? With a digital twin, we can simulate these different scenarios and actually help our customers plan their manufacturing operations,” explains Verma. 8
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Commenting on the benefits of Industrial IoT, Mudford explains that it ultimately depends on the digital maturity of the customer. “However, at the most principal level, we’re talking about yield and production. We’re talking about the ability to produce units faster and at a more cost effective price for the customer.. “A lot of the hype around Industrial IoT is that our customers think that it’s a different operating model. In principle, however, I don’t think it is. What we're really doing is trying to provide insights and put them into the hands of operators - to accelerate the decision making process that they may have been unable to make before. This could include the planning of activities, the automation of assets, or even something as simple as ensuring that operators have the insights to make the right product.” Mudford continues, “we've put the insights into the hands of operators in their core system of engagement, which from a change management perspective reduces the amount of time it takes for an operator or the business to take advantage of these activities. And if you look at the history of innovation, manufacturing has been an innovative industry for a long period of time, but engineers have been solving the problems. When these groups of engineers solve problems, they then move on to the next issue. After a period of time the gains that were made start to erode. One of the benefits that we see from our approach to Industrial IoT is that we can basically embed all of these changes to
ensure that they become sustainable. That's the fundamental difference. As opposed to just throwing sensors or dashboards at people, it's about embedding sustainable change into the operations of a business.” The benefits of custom solutions and developing them on a large scale “Customisation means different things to different people, but for us at Hitachi Vantara, it’s about being able to tailor a solution to the needs of our customers while using repeatable building blocks. That’s where the productisation part of our business comes into it,” says Mudford. “Sometimes you can have a solution bespoke to the customer's needs, but as the customer or the industry evolves, the tailored solution is too unique to evolve with them. We want to get the balance between
solutions that are targeted to a specific customer, industry, or problem that can also be scaled and productised. This is our general philosophy and where we see the greatest amount of benefit.” Adding to Mudford’s comments, Verma explains the two extremes when it comes to hitachivantara.com
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solutions and solving problems. “The first extreme can happen when we deploy a custom solution which is built for a certain client, with their particularities and needs. These solutions tend to require a lot of system integrations and hence, become
ANDREW MUDFORD TITLE: HEAD OF PRODUCT MGMT, INDUSTRY SOLUTION PRACTICE INDUSTRIES: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, IOT, SOCIAL INNOVATION, INFORMATION & ANALYTICS
Andrew Mudford heads Industrial Solutions at Hitachi Vantara and focuses on enabling success with digital transformation, IoT, social innovation, data management and analytics for customers within manufacturing and mining industries. With almost 20 years’ experience, Andrew has been involved in the introduction of several world-leading solutions, including the development and implementation of image capture and facial recognition technologies, laser engraving technologies for enhancing the efficiency and security of passport issuance systems and travel documents, smart meters for utilities, and the introduction of NFC technologies for contactless and mobile payments.
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LOCATION: NSW, AUSTRALIA
expensive in nature, and over time, very difficult to maintain. On the other extreme, we have a cookie-cutter solution business which is pure software. The idea is the company will adjust itself to the customer needs, resulting in a much larger shift from the company. “What we have done at Hitachi Vantara is bring in concepts that enable us to build a solution that gives us economies of scale with lots of features that can be customised at any time. We are inspired by what we call mass customisation and the concept of itemisation which allows software frameworks to be highly monetised. This allows us to leverage a lot of features, but the cost is very low due to them being mass-produced.” Industry-specific personabased solutions and KPIs Being one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world, Hitachi is fortunate to be able to think along the same lines as the customers it serves. “We have built the solutions and designed our technologies while thinking about what happens on the shop floor. We take into consideration everything that the quality manager, the maintenance manager and the health and safety manager does in his / her role. This is what we refer to as a persona-driven solution. We have built this expertise outside of the beta and into a user interface that is easily understood and flexible. “The data transforms into an insights calculation and generates KPIs which feed into the dashboards. The user interfaces allows for the health and safety officer or maintenance officer to access the KPIs or data points directly to enable them to change the way people do their jobs.”
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When it comes to industry-specific KPIs (key performance indicators), Verma adds that these are important to the way that the manufacturing industry works. Working on a set of KPIs, allows manufacturers to be data-driven in their work, as they know that quality work is being produced. “So, as I was saying before, industryspecific persona and the KPIs of a particular industry or subindustry is quite important. Generally speaking, people in the industry talk about manufacturing as one holistic industry area. But when you start breaking it down and consider industries such as mining, medtech, food and beverage, agriculture, paint and chemicals - all of these industries come under the manufacturing umbrella,
although they don't always adhere to the same KPIs. This is why industries need their own specific KPIs, and we need to adhere to these KPIs rather than reinvent them,” continues Verma. Adding to Verma’s comments Mudford says, “This is an area we pride ourselves on. A lot of solutions are trying to squeeze
“We can use IoT technologies to reduce catastrophic failure, which means we can predict failures in advance, and the maintenance schedules can be optimised” SIDDHARTH VERMA
GENERAL MANAGER MANUFACTURING DIVISION, HITACHI VANTARA hitachivantara.com
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“Our biggest challenge is trying to bring forward the capabilities that are there and in a format that the client can actually understand and appreciate” SIDDHARTH VERMA
GENERAL MANAGER MANUFACTURING DIVISION, HITACHI VANTARA
into a one-size-fits-all solution. For us, with persona-based approaches, we can be very targeted when solving problems specific to these industries; for example, from the subindustry we are able to provide a solution to a manufacturer that specifically addresses the maintenance manager's needs. With a one lens approach we’re very strong, but it becomes even more powerful when we get into the sub-industry. From this point we can be even more targeted. “Manufacturing is a very broad term and what's appropriate to a steel manufacturer is different to an automotive manufacturer and an aerospace manufacturer. And so, for us, we pride ourselves on driving personas, not only to the maintenance manager, but the maintenance manager working in steel manufacturing. We talk in their language and about things that resonate with them. We provide value in a faster space of time which we are ultimately going to get measured on. Our customers don't have the time or energy to take on science based projects, and this allows us to demonstrate relevant proof of value.”
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