SKF is a Swedish bearing and seal manufacturing company.
Together with a network of 17,000 distributors,
we cover some 130 countries globally today.
Our challenge is that we have more than 100 factories,
and we need to be able to provide them
with an IT/OT platform that comes with speed,
reliability, and low cost,
while providing support for critical production systems.
The decisive factor in selecting a hybrid cloud solution
was to have a solution that supports
more data-driven manufacturing.
This shift means that we can look to employ
cloud-native operating models,
where we execute workloads on premises at our factories.
Azure Arc enabled data services together
with other Azure hybrid services.
Azure edge services, such as
Azure SQL Edge are imperative components.
It becomes fundamental to have highly available
scalable and centrally managed data platforms.
SQL is the very heart
of the operations performance management
in the factories of the future.
Using Azure hybrid services together with automation tools
like Terraform and other Azure management tools
allowed us to achieve the speed that we're looking for.
We have benefits at
every single level of the organization.
If we look at the shop floor
the collection for these data will help us to
improve the process and the product performance.
At the management level, we will be able to have a
let's say a real-time analysis to try to define the strategy
and the footprint for the future.
When it comes to the Azure Stack,
what we see is actually
up to 40% hard savings when it comes to the hardware
compared to what we have been investing before.
We actually are able to monitor the applications running
inside the factory.
This is something what will help us
and gives us a lot of efficiency and cost savings as well.
We also estimate that we will have up to 30% savings
or reduction of OT related downtimes of the machinery.
Visualizations or reports are helping actually
the operators to more quickly react on deviations
from the shop floor.
We want to come to the point
that we are really proactive so that the operators can act
before the actual deviation is happening.
Preventive maintenance going towards predictive maintenance.
The ultimate goal is to have signals from bearings
at our customer sites, connecting directly
with our manufacturing units.
So the production or re-manufacturing can start
just in time.
We are striving for world-class manufacturing
digitalization is one enabler on our
journey towards world-class.
There's a big benefit,
what we see to really optimize the entire value chain.