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Overview of Manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview)

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Important

Some or all of this functionality is available as part of a preview release. The content and the functionality are subject to change.

In today's manufacturing landscape, harnessing the full power of data is essential for driving innovation, operational efficiency, and informed decision-making. The Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric is at the forefront of this endeavor.

Challenges in manufacturing industry

Manufacturers face numerous challenges that impede their progress towards industrial transformation, compromising operational efficiency and inhibiting informed decision-making, including but not limited to:

  • Need to increase Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and minimize operational costs: To boost factory profitability, manufacturers must enhance equipment efficiency and reduce the costs associated with operations, all while ensuring compliance with federal environmental regulations.

  • Scaling digital factory solutions: Despite understanding the benefits, manufacturers find it difficult to extend digital solutions across their operations effectively and derive substantial value without significant new operational technology (OT) investments.

  • Utilizing legacy infrastructures: In the absence of digital transformation, there's a push to maximize existing infrastructures to avoid expensive replacements. However, this step results in low flexibility in adapting to market changes and obstacles to using data for decision-making, essential for ongoing process improvement.

  • Labor shortages and aging workforce: Concerns are mounting over the difficulty in replacing an aging workforce that retires faster than their institutional knowledge can be passed down, leading to a loss of crucial tacit knowledge.

  • Rising costs of labor and regulatory compliance: Labor costs are climbing, paralleled by the expenses related to complying with federal environmental regulations.

Manufacturing data solutions and capabilities

The Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview) offers a comprehensive framework for data integration and analysis, enabling manufacturers to ingest and organize disparate data from MES systems, machines, sensors, PLCs, and various applications.

The key capabilities of Manufacturing data solutions include:

  • Manufacturing industry data model enables customers to accelerate time to insight generation by unifying, enriching, and modeling manufacturing data, starting with factory-domain data from sensors, systems of record (MES, ERP) and industrial automation applications. It includes an ISA95 (IEC 62264) compliant data model with Microsoft connectors to Azure IoT Operations and Fabric One Lake and partner connectors.

  • Factory Operations Agent in Azure AI builds on top of the Manufacturing data solutions foundation to enable transformational conversational AI use cases at scale. The generative AI-based copilot template powered by Azure OpenAI Service is optimized with a semantic layer designed to address specific manufacturing use cases, such as quality issue resolution, root cause analysis and more. It provides an industry augmentation loop, plug-ins, and skills for diverse and voluminous manufacturing ontologies. It empowers frontline employees with unified data, reducing the burden on IT resources and closing the IT-OT data gap. The integration of the Factory Operations Agent allows factory personnel to query data and generate insights in natural language. This capability fosters powerful, accessible, and democratized decision-making across the business.

  • Manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric is architected and provisioned as a managed on-behalf-of model (MOBO) service using the Azure Resource Manager Resource Provider framework.

  • Partner ecosystem solutions enable factory data ingestion from different systems by building custom or proprietary connectors into Fabric, embedding the solution capabilities into their applications or building custom UI experiences for the copilot templates on Azure AI.

These solutions collectively enhance factory operational efficiency by consolidating the factory data estate, speeding up the resolution of issues, facilitating user interaction in natural language, and integrating with top industrial applications. By empowering manufacturers to effortlessly navigate the complexities of modern manufacturing environments and unlock unprecedented data insights, Manufacturing data solutions paves the way for smarter, more efficient, and innovative manufacturing processes.