Shop Floor Modernization – Watervliet

In previous conflicts, victory came from ramping up production of aircraft, armored vehicles, MRAPs, and other materiel; the next fight will be decided by how swiftly we can upgrade, repair, and redeploy the assets already in our inventory. Yet the Organic Industrial Base—our depots, arsenals, and shipyards—is largely aging and inefficient, making rapid modernization a critical but difficult imperative.

The team duplicated the implementation done at Rock Island Arsenal (RIA) in Watervliet. The overall objective of the Shop Floor Modernization Program was to implement a common set of processes and tools (Cumulocity Edge) to modernize legacy manufacturing and maintenance facilities by improving visibility into the machines health and utilization to allow leadership to make more educated decisions regarding plant utilization, quality of parts, safety, and capacity planning. This data can be leveraged to assist with predictive logistics and supply chain optimization.

This implementation enables the Department of Defense (DoD) to accelerate technology development that can lead to operational adoption of advanced manufacturing capabilities by the U.S. Government. The deployed tool delivers a range of benefits that apply across agencies and industry verticals. It helps stakeholders address challenges in creating results-oriented metrics by enabling a secure, large-scale connection, monitoring and management of devices, events and applications. Key features include support for predictive models and powerful configurable dashboards, enabling organizations to leverage data-driven insights at device level and enterprise data. This tool can also trigger and automated actions to create workflows. For example: In a predictive maintenance use case, analytics can forecast when a machine component is likely to fail. The system can automatically schedule a maintenance window and alert a field technician to replace the part.

Over approximately 6 months, the project team was able to create a program schedule, validate requirements, order the necessary software and hardware, and implement the solution at WVA. Roughly 90% of the planned devices were connected to the platform (the remaining 10% of the planned devices were not identified. The connection enables real-time data sharing with IT and OT teams leading to increased operational insights. With enhanced visibility into machine performance, the solution is expected to reduce maintenance cost by up to 30% and decrease machine downtime by as much as 50%.