Industry 4.0 IT platform launches

The IT firm offers industrial companies a broad range of agile Industry 4.0 solutions and is already effectively tackling the challenges of Industry 4 such as Controlling, Execution of Manufacturing and Plant Maintenance, as well as Quality, Material and Supply Chain Management.

Reply has developed a Manufacturing and Logistics approach, choreographing technologies to provide the flexibility, simplicity, connectedness, smartness, autonomy and openness for new generation of manufacturing.

With the latest release of the Manufacturing Operations Management Platform, Brick Reply continues its commitment to the digital transformation of industrial production. The platform is the backbone for the shopfloor environment of a factory and acts as a central hub for the normalisation of the data streams sent by machines and devices. Brick Reply plays a crucial role for the extended industrial enterprise, enabling planning and management of the entire production flows.

Industry 4 is characterised by flexible manufacturing. Old style conveyor belt based models are replaced by adaptable networks of manufacturing islands. This implies new requirements with regard to logistics. The native integration with the Click Reply Warehouse Management solution enables flexible and interconnected production processes, creating a smart factory model.

The Reply platforms for Industry 4.0 support this evolution through its capabilities such as:

• maintenance management,

• the setting-up of manufacturing islands,

• the integration of AGVs,

• and by providing a central overview and controllability of all processes involved in the production.

The orchestration of production is real time. It takes into account the actual availability of all involved resources. Progressively, adoption of machine learning methods improves the flow of the materials through the production and minimises the downtime of production equipment.

In the field of Predictive Maintenance, Reply has developed a solution based on machine learning methods, that analyses the data acquired and using predictive models, calculates the downtime of plants and machines. This leads to a more efficient planning of maintenance work and helps to avoid unplanned production downtime.

Reply complements the range of Industry 4.0 specific software solutions through a broad range of expertise and experience in the areas of system integration, digital services, cyber security and consulting. The company can help companies utilise cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) and 3D printing technologies.

Reply has an Industry 4.0 readiness assessment that helps to create roadmap tailored to a customer’s individual situation and goals.

Reply’s Eric Cotteret adds: “IoT will make ‘just-in-time’ easier in manufacturing. The benefits are not just efficiency but also visibility and customer satisfaction.

It is not important to have a solution out of the box, but to have business services ready to use, which you can adapt to your bespoke needs. We are seeing a certain amount of ‘Appisation’ – an aggregation of business services and solutions. WMS is not monolithic, it is modular.”