Manufacturing facility monitoring

Context

In any manufacturing facility, breakdowns are expensive and disruptive. They can result in wasted material and extensive damage to the assets.

It is possible to anticipate these breakdowns, perform root cause analysis, and create a virtuous circle to reduce their occurrence with complete monitoring.

In a nutshell, what Quasar delivered

• From hours to seconds to produce a report
• Virtually unlimited history
• No change in the reporting tool used, Quasar replaces the backend transparently
• Storage footprint divided by 20
• Future proof solution thanks to built-in scalability

Challenge

To provide insights about plant operations, one needs to collect, analyze, and visualize numerous metrics.

These metrics allow having a clear understanding of breakdowns, the meantime to respond and repair the breakdowns, and ultimately anticipate them.

However, a plant with many assets generates tens of millions of records per second. This volume exceeds the capabilities of a typical relational database, a default choice for many of these setups.

As volume increases, updates are longer and longer, sometimes taking hours.

When connecting the data to, for example, Power BI, queries are sluggish, and the data lag prevents the monitoring from being effective.

The solution

Quasar can collect all events as they come and store them efficiently. The collection is direct and does not require any third-party software.

Quasar has no practical limit to how many records per second can be inserted and can thus handle hundreds of millions of updates per second at low latency.

Quasar will use its unique algorithm to compress the data faster than it arrives and use its micro-indexes to reduce future lookup and feature extraction time. This results in significantly reduced disk usage without impacting the queryability of the data.

Each sensor is stored in a dedicated table storing timeseries data. Tables can be tagged at will, enabling a flexing querying mechanism based on those tags. For example, obtaining all the sensors of an asset or in a specific area of the plant.

Microsoft Power BI, or any similar tool, can connect to Quasar directly using ODBC, and queries are instant, delivering sub-minute end-to-end data freshness and enabling operational intelligence.

Benefits

• Manufacturing Facility can achieve operation excellence by having exhaustive access to all the data, resulting in significantly lower operational costs
• Exhaustive, low-latency, monitoring of all assets at the highest precision possible, increasing accuracy and thus potential gains
• Building and deploying models is frictionless, leading to a quick feedback loop to improve the accuracy and thus the gains
• Connect tools such as Microsoft Power BI directly and do data science without writing code, reducing the strain on dedicated teams
• Outstanding TCO: extracting features does not require writing custom programs and uses less CPU. Up to 20X less storage space is needed compared to a typical data warehousing solution and up to 1,000X faster feature extraction compared to data lakes