How Hitachi is transforming IoT for business in South Africa

33% of global business executives list IoT as a technological priority – even above major focus areas like robotics and AI – but businesses are still frustrated by how to benefit from this technology.

“There’s no doubt that IoT is quickly becoming the digital transformation end game,” said Hitachi Vantara MD Alexander Jenewein, speaking at a round table event in Johannesburg. “Hitachi Vantara was established to assist businesses with their digital transformation plans – creating digital business agility by solving critical challenges in managing and deriving value from data.”

In South Africa, the appetite for IoT is growing, and many businesses have established a transformation charter, Jenewein said. Yet the adoption of IoT is still fairly slow because stakeholders aren’t clear on the outcomes of their digital transformation plan.

“We still often find that businesses feel the need to implement an IoT system without first establishing the business value,” Jenewein said. “At Hitachi Vantara, we help them to tightly align the implementation process and the business value. Rather than installing IoT solutions as yet another siloed department, we enable businesses to integrate it into their digital transformation plan and to gain real value from it.”

He added that businesses should start implementing technology solutions with actual business outcomes in mind. “Hitachi Vantara’s recent rebrand is uniquely positioned to take businesses on their digital transformation journeys,” said Jenewein.

Improving business efficiency

Hitachi Vantara has seen great success with its IoT offering, recently increasing the yield of a global manufacturer by over 90%.

The company’s polymer mixing process was producing output of inconsistent quality, with yields sometimes dipping as low as 50%. Production engineers were unable to stabilise the process using traditional approaches as mixing polymer was unstable and each new product formulation increased the problem.

Hitachi delivered an advanced analytics platform that integrated a wide range of production data and sensor data outputs to visualise, analyse, and diagnose the mixing process. This new insight enabled the production engineering team to understand the correlations and cause-and-effect from a wide number of variables. By adding machine-learning functionality, the solution was also able to make continuous process adjustments to improve the yield over a period of several months.

During the initial pilot project, the solution eliminated over 50% of the poor-quality batches, increasing the average yields to above 90%. Hitachi Vantara’s solution optimised the process parameters, and the system is now capable of continuously adapting to changing conditions.

Hitachi Vantara

Hitachi Vantara offers analytics, industrial expertise, and technology, helping businesses find the hidden value in data that reveals the path to intelligent innovation.

This new company unifies the operations of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho into a single integrated business aimed at capitalising on Hitachi’s social innovation capability in both operational technologies (OT) and information technologies (IT).

Hitachi Vantara was launched to leverage the broad portfolio of innovation, development, and experience from across Hitachi Group companies – and it does this by bringing together its Lumada IoT platform and data storage portfolio with the Pentaho data integration and business intelligence business.

“Most businesses have data silos that are difficult to correlate and analyse,” said Jenewein. “At Hitacho Vantara, we help decision makers connect these silos, build new revenue streams, create better customer experiences, and lower business costs through comprehensive, data-driven solutions.”

For more information, visit the Hitachi website.

Alexander Jenewein, Hitachi Vantara MD