Hello, this is Nicole Bulanda.
I work at Rockwell Automation
as the Customer Advocacy Program Manager
and I'm joined by Alan from Gray
Solutions to talk about Results Achieved.
Hi, Alan. Good morning.
Thanks for joining me.
Can you tell us what Gray Solutions
does and what your role is? Sure.
Gray Solutions is a full-service
systems integration company.
We specialize in the food and beverage
and consumer products markets.
So we will build anything from a
brand-new greenfield facility to
working on brownfield projects.
My role is Director of
Digital Transformation
so I manage all of our software efforts.
I love your title Alan, I think
that's the coolest title.
Gray Solutions is in our PartnerNetwork,
right? Correct, correct.
So we have a cool story to share
about a customer that you've helped.
Can you tell everyone a little bit about
the customer and what their issue was?
Sure, the customer was a food and beverage,
or really, consumer product manufacturer.
They work making different kinds of wipes,
disposable wipes,
things like that.
They had some issues that if there
was ever a concern with the product,
they have to go back and find where those
quality concerns may have come from.
They might need to be able to
prove that there wasn't a concern
or find that there was,
and then what do they need to do about it.
So with it being a wipe product,
the water that goes into it is critical.
So they needed a way to access live
quality data on their water that was
used in their products and use it for
things like corrective actions or
chasing down a potential product problem.
Interesting.
So what did Gray Solutions come to
this customer with to solve that?
So it's a customer who we've
worked with for years
and we have a lot of their data
being stored already on premise.
But what they had was a situation
where IT and Quality needed to be
able to access data that was really
only accessible by Engineering.
It was data that made sense to engineers.
So we worked with their IT group
to create a new version of their
data in the cloud that would make
it accessible for their lab folks,
for their IT people,
and for others in the organization
to be able to take quicker action
on things rather than having
offline lab data that was after the fact.
That's really neat.
So what tools did you use to
make that a reality?
So we we took the existing data that
they had in Rockwell Automation controllers.
We passed it up through the same data
collection channels that we've always had,
nut now we used FactoryTalk Edge
to move that data to the cloud.
So we put it up through FactoryTalk
Edge into Microsoft Azure Cloud.
So we used Azure IoT hub and then
we used something called Time Series
Insights within Azure and Power
BI to make sense out of that data.
So it's a very seamless
transition of data from the facility,
or facilities in their case,
up to the cloud and out through
tools that the IT department
was already comfortable with.
That's really neat.
So was the customer able to use that data
to help meet the goals they had set?
They were. So the biggest thing
for them was response time.
If you're creating product,
you don't want to continue creating product
if there's any kind of an issue. Or
if you have an issue that did arise,
you want to be able to find that and
minimize the impact of that to the market.
In both of those cases,
they were successful in doing that
because they didn't have to wait
for offline lab data and testing
and that data was accessible to the
people that needed to make those decisions.
So they were able to change from,
instead of tracing down a problem
maybe days or even weeks later,
they were able to find it immediately.
And if there was a problem occurring,
even stop production and not produce
any more product that had a problem.
Wow, that's great.
So I'm imagining that's
fabulous not only for quality,
but also for maybe waste?
Would it help them reduce waste?
It does help with waste and I
think even even more importantly
a lot of times in the market
is just brand reputation.
You don't want things getting
out that cause problems.
That's really neat.
Thank you so much for sharing a
little bit about what Gray Solutions
does and about how you were able
to help this particular customer
achieve some neat results. Sure.
Glad to do it. Thanks so much, Alan.
Thank you.