Databricks Announces Lakehouse for Manufacturing, Empowering the World’s Leading Manufacturers to Realize the Full Value of Their Data

Databricks, the lakehouse company, announced the Databricks Lakehouse for Manufacturing, the first open, enterprise-scale lakehouse platform tailored to manufacturers that unifies data and AI and delivers record-breaking performance for any analytics use case. The sheer volume of tools, systems and architectures required to run a modern manufacturing environment makes secure data sharing and collaboration a challenge at scale, with over 70 percent of data projects stalling at the proof of concept (PoC) stage. Available today, Databricks’ Lakehouse for Manufacturing breaks down these silos and is uniquely designed for manufacturers to access all of their data and make decisions in real-time. Databricks’ Lakehouse for Manufacturing has been adopted by industry-leading organizations like DuPont, Honeywell, Rolls-Royce, Shell and Tata Steel.

Databricks’ newest industry-specific lakehouse goes beyond the limitations of traditional data warehouses by offering integrated AI capabilities and pre-built solutions that accelerate time to value for manufacturers and their partners. These include powerful solutions for predictive maintenance, digital twins, supply chain optimization, demand forecasting, real-time IoT analytics and more. A robust partner ecosystem and custom, partner-built Brickbuilder Solutions offer customers even greater choice in delivering real-time insights and impact across the entire value chain, and at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than complex legacy technologies

“We employed Databricks to optimize inventory planning using data and analytics, positioning parts where they need to be based on the insight we gain from our connected engines in real time and usage patterns we see in our service network,” said Stuart Hughes, Chief Information and Digital Officer at Rolls-Royce Civil Aerospace. “This has helped us minimize risks to engine availability, reduce lead times for spare parts and drive more efficiency in stock turns – all of this enables us to deliver TotalCare, the aviation industry’s leading Power-by-the-Hour (PHB) maintenance program.”

With Databricks, organizations can unlock the value of their existing investments and achieve AI at scale by unifying all of their data – regardless of type, source, frequency or workload – on a single platform. The Lakehouse for Manufacturing has robust data governance and sharing built-in, and enables organizations to deliver real-time insights for agile manufacturing and logistics, across their entire ecosystem.

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Powerful industry solutions tailored for the lakehouse

The Lakehouse for Manufacturing includes access to packaged use case accelerators that are designed to jumpstart the analytics process and offer a blueprint to help organizations tackle critical, high-value industry challenges. Popular data solutions for Databricks’ Lakehouse for Manufacturing customers include:

• Digital Twins: Created from data derived from sensors, digital twins enable engineers to monitor and model systems in real-time. With digital twins, manufacturers can process real-world data in real-time and deliver insights to multiple downstream applications, including process optimization modeling, risk assessments, condition monitoring, and optimized design.
• Predictive Maintenance: By leveraging predictive maintenance, manufacturers can ingest real-time industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) data from field devices and perform complex time-series processing to maximize uptime and minimize maintenance costs.
• Part-Level Forecasting: To avoid inventory stockouts, shorten lead times and maximize sales, manufacturers can perform demand forecasting at the part level rather than the aggregate level.
• Overall Equipment Effectiveness: By incrementally ingesting and processing data from sensor/IoT devices in a variety of formats, organizations can provide a consistent approach to KPI reporting across a global manufacturing network.
• Computer Vision: The development and implementation of computer vision applications enabled manufacturers to automate critical manufacturing processes, improving quality, reducing waste and rework costs, and optimizing flow.

“Shell has been undergoing a digital transformation as part of our ambition to deliver more and cleaner energy solutions. Databricks’ Lakehouse is central to the Shell.ai Platform and the ability to execute rapid queries on massive datasets,” said Dan Jeavons, VP Computational Science and Digital Innovation at Shell. “With the help of Databricks, Shell is better able to use its full historic data set to run 10,000+ inventory simulations across all its parts and facilities. Shell’s inventory prediction models now run in a few hours rather than days, significantly improving stocking practices and driving significant savings annually.”

Databricks Partners deliver an ecosystem of powerful, purpose-built solutions for manufacturers

Customers across the manufacturing industry also benefit from vetted data solutions from leading partners like Avanade, Celebal Technologies, DataSentics, Deloitte and Tredence, which are tailor-made to combine the power of Databricks’ Lakehouse Platform with proven industry expertise. Partner Brickbuilder Solutions and popular use cases for the Lakehouse for Manufacturing include:

• Avanade Intelligent Manufacturing: Avanade enables manufacturers to harness all types of data, drive interoperability and realize more value throughout the manufacturing lifecycle with a comprehensive look at connected production facilities and assets.
• Celebal Technologies Migrate to Databricks: A suite of proven tools from Celebal Technologies empowers organizations to easily migrate legacy on-premises/cloud environments to the Lakehouse Platform and addresses the key scalability, performance and cost challenges of legacy systems.
• DataSentics Quality Inspector: With DataSentics, manufacturers can leverage computer vision to automate quality control and easily detect defects, foreign objects and anomalies throughout the manufacturing process, from classification and detection to product segmentation and tracking.
• Deloitte Smart Factory: Deloitte offers automated Monthly Management Reporting to deliver dynamic insights and enable a digital organization supported by an enterprise data lake and advanced analytics.
• Tredence Predictive Supply Risk Management: Tredence unifies siloed data and drives end-to-end visibility into order flows and supplier performance with a holistic view of the entire supply chain, coupled with real-time data to assess risk factors and prescriptive, AI-powered recommendations across all supply chain functions.

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“Avanade is delighted to partner with industry innovators like Databricks. As the leading Microsoft Partner for Manufacturing, we see manufacturers getting smarter about how they use digital technologies – because they have to. Times are tough and innovations today must deliver more value more quickly across more of the organization than ever before. The potential of lakehouse is truly exciting and will play a significant part in our Industry X and Smart Digital Manufacturing services,” said Thomas Nall, Avanade Manufacturing Lead.

“Using the Lakehouse for Manufacturing, a business can utilize all data sources in their value chain so that the power of predictive AI and ML insights can be realized to identify inefficiencies in production processes, improve productivity, enhance quality control, and reduce supply chain costs. This data-driven manufacturing is where we see the industry going as companies seek to accelerate their Smart Factory transformations,” said Anthony Abbattista, Principal and Smart Factory Analytics Offering Leader at Deloitte Consulting LLP.

“With rising costs, plateauing industrial productivity, and talent gaps, manufacturing companies are facing unprecedented operational challenges. At the same time, autonomy, connectivity and electrification are shaping an entirely new approach of software-defined products that require a transformation of the business and operating model to be competitive and innovative. In the next 5 years, the companies that outperform in this industry will be the ones that not only manage data but effectively operationalize the value from data, analytics and AI at scale,” said Shiv Trisal, Global Industry Leader for Manufacturing at Databricks. “We are very excited to launch tailored accelerators that target the industry’s biggest pain points, and collaborate with leading partners to introduce Lakehouse for Manufacturing, enabling data teams to boost industrial productivity, gain nth-tier supply chain visibility and deliver smarter products and services at an accelerated pace.”

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