Great Lakes Brewing Company Quenches Increased Demand With Manufacturing Analytics Solution From Rockwell Automation

Craft beer is a growing business in the United States, and even established breweries are looking for ways to keep up with demand. Cleveland-based Great Lakes Brewing Company (GLBC), an independent craft brewery founded in 1988, recently deployed new manufacturing analytics technology that helps to scale production without sacrificing product quality.

GLBC deployed the FactoryTalk Analytics for Devices appliance from Rockwell Automation to bring the Internet of Things (IoT) and analytics to its factory floor. The technology helps to give GLBC greater insight into the health of its beer-brewing machinery to help increase efficiency, improve quality and minimize downtime.

Great Lakes Brewing Company has been committed to providing good beer and is focused on production quality as well as the ingredients used in its brewing process. Adding advanced analytics and hardware diagnostics to its factory floor allows the company to continue fulfilling its quality commitment by providing additional insight into its production equipment.

The solution provides health and diagnostic analytics from devices on the brewery’s plant floor. Inside the Rockwell Automation appliance there is a bot called “Shelby” that can interact with production staff using natural language processing. This technology is based on the Microsoft Bot Framework and trained with Microsoft Cognitive Services to help enable brewery staff to identify and address equipment challenges in real time.

Shelby has been helpful in the brewery's transition to a more connected plant-floor environment, allowing the company to tap into existing data to solve problems faster. The solution deployed by GLBC is one component of a joint technology collaboration between Rockwell Automation and Microsoft designed to help companies better leverage digital transformation.

Great Lakes Brewing Company’s solution is part of a broader trend of digital transformation that is helping support the continued growth of industry in the U.S. by providing engineers with additional actionable data and insights, helping to enable manufacturing companies to transform their businesses using data and deep analytics to improve efficiency and productivity.

To learn more about how Great Lakes Brewing Company is using scalable analytics to benefit its operations, watch this video from Rockwell Automation and Microsoft.