Brick Reply - Industry 4.0 Operations

Industry 4.0 is the technological response to the complex scenario facing the manufacturing sector today. The digital transformation, the constantly changing economic situation and the need for an increasingly faster time-to-market dictate the need for a major change to take place. The key element in this transition is the increased technological potential available now – IoT, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning – leading to a reinvented notion of the factory concept: full cooperation and communication between machines, men and even products.

A wide and diverse range of new technologies is contributing to the Industry 4.0 concept, with the key players being the Internet of Things, Big Data, Machine Learning and Cloud Computing. Knowledge and a maximum level of proficiency of each technology requires strong vertical expertise, as well as methodologies and skills that are often very different from one another.

Being able to rely on its broad network, Reply is engaged in many aspects of Industry 4.0. Brick Reply, a Manufacturing Operations Management platform designed and built to operate in the manufacturing sector, is a key market asset in this area. The platform offers process governance functionality and provides support to the integration of new technologies, thanks to an innovative service-oriented architecture and native support of the IoT and Cloud Computing technologies.

Brick Reply is based on a fully open, service-oriented architecture designed to interface with machinery and to coordinate production processes in the factory. It has positioned itself as the factory backbone of process governance and integration with field equipment. In fact, thanks to a single point of control, the Brick Hub Connector, the platform enables communication between traditional production processes – production control, planning and quality – and the increasingly intelligent physical devices – sensors, machinery, robots and installations – used during production activities.

The service-oriented platform architecture also allows for the integration and use of specific specialised components such as Senseye, an innovative Predictive Maintenance application developed by Senseye, a company that is part of the Reply Group enterprise incubator, Breed Reply.

Senseye manages plant maintenance through the use of mathematical Machine Learning models capable of providing concrete predictions on machinery maintenance interventions and outages. The combined use of Brick Reply for overall plant management, focused on data collection and process governance, and of Senseye, focused on predictive maintenance, facilitates concrete solutions to advanced application scenarios within the Industry 4.0 paradigm.