Testing innovations can bring costly problems like pausing production. A new industrial Internet of Things (IoT) lab in central London aims to change that.
It’s a painfully familiar story on the shopfloor. Your business needs to innovate so you’re testing a new solution, which means pausing the production line and investing in kit which may (or may not) work. Often, the disruption is so prohibitive that businesses choose not to invest. And the alternative – relying on an investor to stump up the CapEx for a dedicated R&D space – brings its own challenges.
These on-site issues were seen again and again during customer projects by Rachel Grunwerg, Partner at Storm Reply, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud engineering company. “Stopping a line to test a new solution is problematic, so manufacturers understandably don’t like shutting down just to test things,” Rachel says.
So, Rachel and Storm Reply Partner Matt Mould decided to fix it. After a six-figure investment, and much iterating with customers including wire joiner manufacturer Gripple, the result is unique: a new lab in central London which doubles as a fully-fledged manufacturing line, enabling the company to test solutions and create proof of concepts off-site.
Computing at the edge
The lab itself is brimming with sophisticated hardware and software covering a wide range of industrial use cases. It operates in an area of edge computing – a model which puts computing as close as possible to the source of data – specifically industrial IoT. But how can manufacturers actually use the lab, and what results can it provide?
One example is the production of line data across multiple sites, which can help improve operational efficiency. Storm Reply’s Matt Mould says: “Previously manufacturers had to accept they don’t know how efficient their line is, or work on a gut-feeling that they’re at capacity. Data eliminates that guesswork.”
The team can also produce digital twins at pace, visualising data in an accessible and highly specific way, down to particular control systems or even parts. Matt explains: “We’ve got the hardware and skills to map around 30 square metres of a customer’s site on day one, and produce our own digital twin dashboard on day two. This usually takes much longer but our hardware is preconfigured to gather the right data.”
One of Storm Reply’s most powerful solutions is asset monitoring and predictive (AMP) which was successfully implemented by the insulated panels division of Kingspan. AMP allows manufacturers to detect equipment damage earlier, reduce production line recovery times, and eliminate unnecessary call-outs. Similarly, computer vision is a cutting-edge way for businesses to detect product defects using visual AI.
Engineering the best results
Storm Reply resources the lab flexibly from a team of 30 experts. Officially launched in summer 2024, it has been used by Kingspan and Irish instrument manufacturer Lowden Guitars, and boasts an enviable pipeline of projects starting in autumn. As Rachel explains, the lab’s results are already proven.
“We’ve developed the approach organically because we wanted our customer projects to be efficient. It benefited everyone for us to play out our tests locally. Initially, we expected customers to come into the lab to test themselves, but it’s been more appealing for us to test in the lab rather than having to come on-site,” she says.
Part of the global Reply Group with R&D labs in FIAT’s iconic former Lingotto factory in Turin, Storm Reply believes its cloud-native industrial IoT solutions lab is the only one of its kind in the UK.
Rachel Grunwerg explains how the company’s niche nature enables it to offer a bespoke service compared to global giants like Siemens and IBM. She says: “Really, we’re playing in a different field, even to our closest competitors. We’re just as happy working on a week-long project as a multi-year one, which global consultancies wouldn’t even consider.
“We can also handle any types of hardware, and the principle behind our IoT tech solution is that it’s AWS native, it’s not a SaaS product. And finally, the customer owns the solution – we don’t retain the IP, so they aren’t locked-in to us as a single vendor.”
There are knock-on benefits of combining cloud-native solutions with the power of the edge: not least empowering a manufacturing company’s control systems or automation team to take control of their own solution.
Matt again: “If the customer’s production runs on logic control systems, they can share their code with us and we run it off-site in the lab. There’s no server with a ‘start menu’ and apps installed, it’s all consumed from Amazon’s cloud. A head of operational technology can use their CapEx or OPEX to leverage a cloud solution from us with essentially zero IT overheads.”
Testing time
While testing innovations on-site is often fraught with disruption, Storm Reply’s IoT lab poses a powerful alternative. These are early days, but Rachel and Matt are confident about the coming months. When it comes to industrial innovation, edge computing combined with native cloud services might be what gives your business the competitive edge.
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