Overview
Industry 4.0 SaaS Platform to Improve End-Customer Production Processes.
VEM Sistemi is an Italian System Integration company specializing in providing ICT solutions. The company chose beSharp to launch Factorii Easy Production Improvement, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform designed to address all functions of the digital factory (Industry 4.0). Specifically, it provides real-time performance monitoring and planned and predictive maintenance for industrial machinery to enhance production processes.
beSharp engineered an Industry 4.0 solution delivered in a SaaS model for VEM Sistemi, leveraging the services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The beSharp team oversaw the infrastructure design phase, ensuring compliance with the AWS Well-Architected Framework, before proceeding with service implementation following DevOps best practices.
Furthermore, through a training-on-the-job approach, beSharp equipped VEM Sistemi’s developers with the tools necessary to understand and master the concepts and components of the SaaS paradigm, enabling the company to maximize its benefits.
The Challenge
Identifying Waste and Failures for Timely Intervention via Planned or Predictive Maintenance.
- Obtaining a flexible, scalable and cost-effective solution for the ingestion of all the data coming from customers’ Industrial equipment (IoT) taking advantage of the SaaS delivery model.
- Implementing a multi-tenant, highly available solution, able to adapt to any type of workload, growing along with their business by responding with adaptive scaling.
- Automating the deployment phases, simplifying control and management of the infrastructure and implementing standard processes of testing and validation of each release.
The Solution
Adopting a SaaS Model to Improve Maintainability, Troubleshooting, and Worldwide Distribution.
- Creation of an Industry 4.0 platform, based on AWS IoT
Core as a centralized MQTT broker used by all IoT machines to
send events, alarms, and metrics and AWS IoT
Greengrass to automate massive deployments thanks to
deployment groups.
Serverless services like AWS Lambda Functions and Amazon API Gateway as well as a more granular microservices-based architecture have been implemented. - Implementation of the SaaS delivery model for the distribution of the new product designed and built according to the AWS Well-Architected Framework and to the AWS SaaS best practices.
- Implementation of CI/CD pipelines through the use of AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and Amazon CodeDeploy, and a strict division into different development environments: dev to keep control of all the changes affecting the application core, staging used to test application’s changes in a production-like infrastructure (also validated by demo users), and production.
We were almost new to the SaaS delivery model and the expertise of beSharp’s team immediately ensured us the confidence we were looking for. beSharp’s cloud experts supported us at every stage of the project with unmatched consulting expertise. We developed a solution which perfectly fits our needs and allows us to grow faster than we thought.