Capgemini Plant Control Tower: 6 months Implementation

Azure Cloud Plant Control Tower, an OEE management platform, is one of the top 5 key use cases in Manufacturing, providing visibility on machines, lines, and plants efficiency, through KPIs calculation and dashboards.

As PCT is an end-to-end solution, from machines connectivity to analytics and dashboards, the solution must be able to support the manufacturing requirements : High speed and frequency data acquisition, full scalability, high availability, security.

First, PCT is cloud native and serverless to fit these requirements. The immediate benefit choosing an Azure serverless architecture is that our development team could focus on functional & business value, to solve client concerns.

PCT is also leveraging IoT Edge Platform, for machines and IoT connectivity, and further edge analytics. IoT edge is providing an efficient platform to collect real-time data from the shopfloor, process the data to a unified format and send to the storage.

For the storage, PCT is based on Azure CosmoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service for modern app development. Azure CosmoDB guarantees single-digit millisecond response times and 99.999-percent availability, backed by SLAs, automatic and instant scalability.

The security is managed by Azure Security Services.

Business Model The intent of Capgemini with PCT is to offer a range of professional services on top of Azure Cloud Services, and a potential “technology access fee” to acquire the right to use PCT. The services are centered around:

• Custom development, including creation of connectors between the sources systems, both OT systems and IT systems (Industrial IoT, IoT, MES, PLM, ERP…) and PCT, customization of the interfaces, development of specific features
• Architecture and integration of PCT in the global OT and IT landscape, including machines and devices connectivity, edge integration and Manufacturing and Enterprise IT systems integration
• Consulting services, for use-cases assessment, IT/OT assessment, change management and training. This can also include IT/OT integration on Azure IoT Edge and analytics and Move-to-Cloud work, with specific Capgemini entities dedicated to implementing Cloud initiatives across different sectors