Technology conglomerate Siemens and cloud giant Snowflake have announced a strategic collaboration. It aims to make it easier for manufacturing companies to integrate operational data (OT) from the factory floor with business data (IT) in a single analytics environment.
The partnership is expected to break down traditional information silos and pave the way for advanced analytics and generative AI applications in industry.
The essence of the integration is the combination of the Siemens Industrial Edge platform, running on edge devices in factories, with the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. The Siemens solution collects and pre-processes data directly from machines, PLCs and sensors.
This information is then transferred to the Snowflake platform in a standardised way via dedicated applications.
There, data from production lines can be combined with data from IT systems such as ERP, logistics or finance.
Creating such a unified data set is key to gaining a complete picture of operations. Companies can thus analyse how machine parameters affect logistics costs or how raw material quality translates into production efficiency and service needs.
The aim of the collaboration is to provide manufacturers with a ready-made tool to improve operational efficiency based on data. AI-based analytics can be used to optimise machine performance, improve product quality or implement predictive maintenance.
The ability to train AI models on combined IT/OT data also paves the way for building more advanced AI agents capable of autonomously optimising processes.
The solution is already being used commercially. FFT, a supplier of production systems for the automotive industry, has implemented the integration at its plants. It uses the Siemens Industrial Edge ecosystem to transfer production data to the Snowflake cloud, where it is further analysed to optimise processes.
This partnership is part of a broader trend of making it easier for industrial companies to access advanced analytics tools, which until now have been the domain mainly of the digital sector.
