Joining Forces — How Industrial Customers Benefit from the Partnership between Belden and TensorIoT
By: Nicholas Burden, Senior Technical Evangelist, TensorIoT, and Sylvia Feng, Global Director Digital Automation Consulting for Belden
Over the course of time, businesses evolve to adapt to market trends and cutting edge technology. One part of that process is establishing foundational partnerships with other businesses that can work together to drive mutually successful outcomes and provide innovative solutions to customers. Belden delivers the infrastructure that makes the digital journey simpler, smarter and secure. With a legacy of quality and reliability spanning 120-plus years, Belden has a strong foundation to continue building the future and is moving beyond connectivity with forward-thinking expertise and purpose-built solutions. To advance the evolution of business, Belden helps customers digitize their plants, connect data to and from the edge, and, working with partners like TensorIoT, helps those customers gain new insights and value from their data.
Belden is an expert at providing top-tier data ingestion from a variety of different industry protocols and formats, aggregating the data stream and adding context, and TensorIoT provides expertise in performing next-gen analytics and applications for an extensive range of use cases. Advanced data analytics, often using machine learning, can provide insight otherwise unavailable to improve sustainability, improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and eliminate waste. This is delivered through tools and applications such as trend mapping, capacity management optimization, production forecasting and scheduling, carbon footprint reporting, automated defect detection, and more.
Industrial customers often face challenges with data ingestion, and often have multiple data sources across multiple production sites and systems. In addition to working directly with networking infrastructure to ensure data is flowing end-to-end, Belden also provides data engineering services for a customer’s industrial systems to enable the marshaling and collection of data from any number of protocols or industrial systems. TensorIoT then provides the workflow and data transformations to produce metrics or key performance indicators (KPI) a customer wishes to monitor, identifies how to address specific customer pain points, and tailors and deploys a customized solution.
One example of the power of the Belden/TensorIoT partnership is how Belden connectivity and TensorIoT advanced data analytics solutions combine to deliver deep insights. TensorIoT looks to Belden to provide the customer data for system integration, and then helps customers unlock the maximum value of their data with packaged TensorIoT solutions, such as SmartInsights, or via custom solutions tailored to a customer’s specific needs. For example, SmartInsights from TensorIoT, powered by AWS, is an advanced data analytics solution that industrial and commercial customers use to rapidly connect and derive actionable insights from operational systems. SmartInsights ingests machine data from a variety of sources, including Belden Horizon Data Operations, into Amazon Web Services (AWS), enabling accelerated insights and increased business value by quickly liberating data from floor operations into the cloud.
One of the first test-runs of the partnership has been the digitization of Belden’s own Richmond plant! To support the partnership and prove the level of collaboration, TensorIoT looked at production data within the Richmond facility with the eye for optimized equipment monitoring and maintenance, using anomaly detection to avoid any catastrophic failure that would lead to unplanned downtime of equipment. Since equipment maintenance isn’t necessarily linked to specific time frames but can vary due to the amount of use and wear that industrial equipment is subjected to during normal operations, optimizing maintenance schedules can be a challenge without monitoring data trends in equipment that signal a need for upkeep. With TensorIoT SmartInsights to provide equipment data analytics and anomaly detection, Belden gains a robust system to maximize operational efficiency and provide visibility to plant management of potential downtime issues. TensorIoT and Belden have also collaborated on environmental monitoring to protect staff and equipment by providing a safe and comfortable workspace.
The power of the partnership between Belden and TensorIoT is clear. If you’re looking for a complete end-to-end solution to help your business embrace Industry 4.0, maximize operational efficiency and gain actionable insights from your equipment data, contact Belden at Ecosystem@Belden.com and contact TensorIoT at contact@tensoriot.com
