AI Solutions for Manufacturing
Manufacture success with AI
Industry 4.0 is here, and like the steam engine centuries ago, it's ready to revolutionize manufacturing. For today's industrial revolution, manufacturers rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to build a smart factory that produces the operational and cost efficiencies promised by Industry 4.0.
Industry 4.0 is here, and like the steam engine centuries ago, it's ready to revolutionize manufacturing.
From boosting productivity to improving product quality to producing more personally customized products, Industry 4.0 is changing the game for both manufacturers and consumers. For today's industrial revolution, manufacturers rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to build a smart factory that produces the operational and cost efficiencies promised by Industry 4.0. Research by Accenture suggests that AI will add nearly $37 trillion to the manufacturing sector by 2035.
Features and Benefits
The capabilities that set NetApp AI Solutions for Manufacturing apart.
Manufacture success with AI
Intelligent maintenance
AI-connected sensors help predict equipment failures before they happen so that you can schedule maintenance to prevent downtime.
Quality control
By combining AI with computer vision, you can detect product defects in real time. AI can also help predict the quality of your finished product based on the characteristics of your raw materials.
Process and efficiency management
AI automates tasks and improves safety and energy management. By streamlining manufacturing processes with AI, you can maximize production and optimize your labor investment.
Supply chain management
An AI-integrated supply chain provides real-time inventory management, insight into individual vendors, and raw material price forecasting—enabling continuous production and more agile decision making.
Intelligent maintenance
Proactive maintenance approach
Intelligent maintenance uses AI to continuously monitor and predict when a machine failure might occur, giving engineers time to order a part and schedule downtime to install it. This proactive approach to maintenance makes assets more reliable while saving time and money.
Why intelligent maintenance?
- 10x return on investment (ROI)
- 25-30% reduction in downtime
- 35-45% reduction in maintenance costs
- 20-25% increase in production
Failure elimination
When done the right way, predictive maintenance can eliminate 70% to 75% of failures while boosting production by 20% to 25%.
Quality control
Computer vision and trained algorithms
Product quality can make or break your business. Quality control processes span the entire manufacturing lifecycle—from design to final product. Missteps at any point in the process can end up costing manufacturers millions (or even billions) of dollars. Computer vision and trained algorithms on the factory floor can be used to detect anomalies in production and performance that the human eye simply can't see.
Catching component defects before they go into production
- Prevents waste
- Creates better end products
- Helps avoid costly recalls
- Mitigates potential litigation
- Helps maintain a positive brand reputation
The cost of quality
- Inspection: Detect and resolve issues during raw materials inspection. (1 product)
- Nonconformance: Identify and remove non-conforming material from the manufacturing process. (10 products)
- Corrective and preventive action: Detect anomalies during the final production inspection. (100 products)
- Complaint: Customer identifies defect and issues a complaint. (1,000 products)
- Recall: Product recall is issued, causing massive financial and reputation damage to the manufacturer. (10,000 products)
Process and efficiency management
Task automation
Machines can work 24/7 at a consistent speed, with consistent quality, increasing overall production throughput. Although this automation might seem to be taking valuable jobs away from human workers, it actually frees skilled workers to take on more important tasks.
Energy management
To help reduce operational costs, AI can also be used to monitor and analyze energy consumption in the factory. Getting energy costs under control helps free up funds for improving production processes and output.
Safety
AI can also be used to improve safety on the factory floor. Cameras and sensors can alert you to potential hazards such as gas leaks so that you can address issues before they become dangerous. Wearable sensors can help make sure that workers are following safety protocols and send a warning before an accident happens.
Supply chain management
Real-time inventory management
Real-time inventory management prevents you from tying up millions of dollars in capital for excess safety stock, while keeping control over the components and materials you need to keep production flowing.
Automation
Automation helps free up more than 6,500 hours per year for administrative tasks such as processing paperwork, adjusting purchase orders, and responding to supplier inquiries.
Greater insight and automated communication
Greater insight and automated communication with individual vendors help you manage changes in schedules and demand. For example, you can automatically notify a supplier to push up or pause a delivery.
Benefits of implementing digital technologies like AI into supply chain management
- Up to 75% reduction in lost sales
- 30% lower supply-chain administrative costs
- 30% reduction in logistics costs
- Up to 5% increase in annual earnings growth before interest and taxes
Automated planning
Automated planning helps you make more informed, agile business decisions. Instead of planning out for a month at a time, you can use AI to make more accurate, real-time predictions such as raw material price forecasting or demand for specific products.
Three keys to success
More accurate models
When it comes to AI, the more data, the more accurate the model. But more data means larger AI models—some with millions or billions of parameters. Not only does all of this data need to be managed—it also needs to be protected within the strict limits of internal and external compliance regulations.
Seamless data movement
In a smart factory, thousands of edge locations gather terabytes of data every day. Effective AI requires a data pipeline that spans the entire ecosystem, from ingest and data preparation all the way to analysis and tiering. Data must be able to flow quickly and freely throughout the pipeline at every step. When access to this data is limited by a siloed infrastructure, deep learning only scratches the surface.
Speed
AI infrastructures must be able to react in a heartbeat. For applications such as quality control or worker safety, your computer vision applications need to be able to ingest, process, and respond instantly.
Artificial intelligence meets real business benefits
NetApp data availability
NetApp helps keep your data available in the right place at the right time to fuel transformation. We remove data silos to provide real-time supply chain insight and efficiency, enable optimized equipment and product yield, make labor more productive, and reduce costs. Our proven AI solutions integrate with your legacy IT infrastructure and the world's biggest public clouds. As the data authority on hybrid cloud, NetApp delivers AI solutions that remove bottlenecks at the edge, core, and cloud.
Optimize productivity
Optimize productivity with up to 300GBps read throughput per all-flash cluster with well under 1ms of latency.
Extract the most value from your data
Extract the most value from your data with a data fabric and VantEdge edge inferencing solution that allow you to easily move data from edge to core to cloud.
Keep your data safe
Keep your data safe with trusted data protection, compliance, and secure access for your distributed, diverse, and dynamic AI data.
Grow without limits
Grow without limits by seamlessly scaling from hundreds of terabytes to tens of petabytes.
Make AI easier with NetApp
- Run five times more data through your pipeline.
- Copy datasets in <60 seconds rather than hours or days.
- Configure your AI infrastructure with Ansible integration in ~20 minutes.
Expert Guidance
Thrive with expert-led storage guidance
Get tailored advice on how NetApp AI Solutions for Manufacturing fits your environment — from sizing and deployment to long-term optimization.
Technical Specifications
Exhaustive hardware and software metrics extracted directly from official documentation.
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IE executives believing AI will significantly impact their organization71%
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IE executives believing AI will significantly impact the industrial equipment industry78%
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Projected AI addition to manufacturing sector by 2035Nearly $37 trillion
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Return on investment (ROI)10x
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Reduction in downtime25-30%
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Reduction in maintenance costs35-45%
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Increase in production20-25%
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Annual cost of unplanned downtime to manufacturers$50 billion
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Failure elimination via predictive maintenance70% to 75%
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Production boost via predictive maintenance20% to 25%
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Inspection1 product
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Nonconformance10 products
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Corrective and preventive action100 products
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Complaint1,000 products
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Recall10,000 products
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Reduction in lost salesUp to 75%
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Lower supply-chain administrative costs30%
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Reduction in logistics costs30%
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Increase in annual earnings growth before interest and taxesUp to 5%
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Hours freed per year through automationMore than 6,500 hours
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Data pipeline throughputRun five times more data through your pipeline
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Dataset copy time<60 seconds
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AI infrastructure configuration time with Ansible integration~20 minutes
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Read throughput per all-flash clusterUp to 300GBps
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LatencyWell under 1ms
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ScalabilityFrom hundreds of terabytes to tens of petabytes
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Phone+1 877 263 8277
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Document IDNA-787-0222
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Copyright© 2022 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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