Domain where Hadoop can be used: MANUFACTURING

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Assure Just-In-Time Delivery of Raw Materials

Manufacturers want to minimize the inventory that they keep on hand and prefer just-in-time delivery of raw materials. On the other hand, stock-outs can cause harmful production delays. Sensors, and RFID tags and IoT in manufacturing reduce the cost of capturing supply chain data, but this creates a large, ongoing flow of data. Hadoop can store this unstructured data at a relatively low cost. That means that manufacturers have more visibility into the history of their supply chains and they are able to see large patterns that might be invisible in only a few months of data. This intelligence can give manufacturers greater lead-time to adjust to supply chain disruptions. It also allows them the connected factory to reduce supply chain costs and improve margins on the finished product.

Control Quality with Real-Time & Historical Assembly Line Data

High-tech manufacturers use sensors to capture data at critical steps in the manufacturing process. This data is useful at the time of manufacture, to detect problems while they are occurring. However, some subtle problems—the “unknown unknowns”—may not be detected at time of manufacture. Nevertheless, those may lead to higher rates of malfunction after the product is purchased. When a product is returned with problems, the manufacturer can do forensic tests on the product and combine the forensic data with the original sensor data from when the product was manufactured. This big data in manufacturing adds added visibility, across a large number of products, helps the manufacturer improve the process and products to levels not possible in a data-scarce environment.

Avoid Stoppages with Proactive Equipment Maintenance

Today’s manufacturing workflows involve sophisticated machines coordinated across pre-defined, precise steps. One machine malfunction can stop the production line. Premature maintenance has a cost; there is an optimal schedule for maintenance and repairs: not too early, not too late. Machine learning algorithms can compare maintenance events and machine data for each piece of equipment to its history of malfunctions. These algorithms can derive optimal maintenance schedules, based on real-time information and historical data. This The use of manufacturing predictive analytics can help maximize equipment utilization, minimize P&E expense, and avoid surprise work stoppages.

Increase Yields in Drug Manufacturing

Biopharma manufacturing requires careful monitoring and control of environment conditions. The goal of any production run is to maximize First Time Yield (FTY), which is a measure of the number of products that are made correctly the first time they come through the production line. Every percentage of increase in FTY represents a significant reduction in the costs of production. FTY improvements are often blocked by poor visibility into operations. Sensors can provide raw data for improving that visibility, if the sensor data can be integrated with other existing data stores. A Hadoop data lake makes this integration easier, because Hadoop does not require an a priori schema prior to ingest. Also, Hadoop’s lower cost of storage means that a cluster can store more data, of more formats, for longer for discovering new relationships in the data. Read about how Merck Research Laboratories optimized pharmaceutical manufacturing with Hortonworks Data Platform.

Crowdsource Quality Assurance

Thoroughly tested products still have post-sale problems. Customers may not report problems to the manufacturer, but still complain about the product to their friends and family on social media. This social stream of data on product issues can augment product feedback from traditional support channels. Hadoop stores huge volumes of social media sentiment data. Manufacturers can mine this data for early signals on how a product holds up throughout its lifecycle. This ability to learn about issues quickly and take early action to protect a product’s reputation is powerful for winning and maintaining customer loyalty.