How the Cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) are Used by Dow, DHL Supply Chain, Thermo Fisher, Coca-Cola Icecek, and Deep Sky Vineyard: Case Studies

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As many companies find new ways to extract data from their networks of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices to improve process monitoring, customer interactions, and efficiency, they become more dependent on cloud environments.

The case studies below illustrate how several companies integrate their IoT devices with the cloud to improve their businesses:

See more: The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Market

 5 IoT Cloud Case Studies

1. Coca-Cola Içecek

One of the key bottlers in the Coca-Cola ecosystem, Coca-Cola Içecek (CCI) services more than 400 million consumers in 10 countries across central Asia and the Middle East. CCI sought to improve the efficiency of their 26 bottling plants, starting with input from their clean-in-place (CIP) equipment, to model a digital twin bottling plant.

“Our CIP is an everyday production process and crucial for industry hygiene and quality requirements,” says Burcu Hacioglu, digital twin product owner at CCI. “We wanted to improve process efficiency by avoiding errors in time measurement, which could lead to CCI plants overusing energy and water.”

CCI fed their industrial IoT information to the AWS cloud where it was used to create data models that could be manipulated to improve efficiency in the system. Early success with the CIP process motivated CCI to expand the model to include filler-mixer machines.

Industry: Beverage

IoT cloud provider: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Outcomes:

• Over 30 improvement opportunities identified
• 20% savings in electricity and 9% savings in water
• 34 days of processing time saved per year

Read the full case study on CCI and AWS.

2. Deep Sky Vineyard 

Family-owned Deep Sky Vineyard operates in Arizona and Argentina to grow grapes for wine. In one of their vineyards, an unmonitored irrigation valve broke and flooded an entire zone, which motivated Deep Sky to improve information over the entire crop management process using cloud-connected instrumentation.

“This year, I already know several ways we’ll improve our grapes,“ says Phil Asmundson, owner of Deep Sky Vineyard. “Without this digital solution, … we wouldn’t have the invaluable insights needed to make these decisions.”

Deep Sky installed connected hardware to monitor water flow, soil moisture, and other factors to automate and monitor the vineyard. The data flows wirelessly to the Google Cloud to be processed and analyzed.

Industry: Agriculture

IoT cloud provider: Google Cloud

Outcomes:

• Saves 1.6 million gallons of water over 15 acres
• Produces a 30% saving in labor
• Reduces human error costs by as much as 75%

Read the full case study on Deep Sky Vineyard and the Google Cloud. 

See more: 85 Top IoT Devices

3. DHL Supply Chain 

In more than 50 countries around the world DHL Supply Chain provides customers with highly automated logistics, storage, transportation, and distribution services. Although operating in a labor-intensive industry, DHL strives to reduce the most labor-intensive tasks by using robotics and automation.

“With the integration capabilities we’ve gained, employees can now simplify or eliminate the most tedious parts of their jobs and contribute in more valuable ways,” says Fekko Roelofs, program manager of robotics hub and resource orchestration at DHL Supply Chain.

Integrating automation at each facility separately consumed a lot of time, so DHL implemented a centralized hub on the cloud. Their new architecture feeds information from robotics, wearable devices, and other data sources to develop reporting and allow for rapid and simple integration of new equipment.

Industry: Supply chain

IoT cloud provider: Microsoft Azure

Outcomes:

• Reduced robotics integration times by 60%
• Enabled real-time data reporting from a centralized dashboard
• Plug-and-play flexibility realized

Read the full case study of DHL Supply Chain and Microsoft Azure.

4. Dow

The worldwide chemical manufacturer Dow strives for zero safety-related incidents. However, vast factories and numerous production lines lead to huge numbers of points to monitor for their Digital Operations Center.  

“In this situation, we were looking at more than just the speed at which we could put together a solution for monitoring video at the edge — there are open-source tools we could have used to cobble something together,” says Michael Dessauer, senior solutions manager at the Dow Digital Operations Center. “But we need to scale our solution to thousands of deployments.” 

Initially, Dow selected to monitor for leaks using video. Video feeds need quick analysis to issue timely alerts but also need tight security. Dow opted to incorporate edge technology to generate alerts quickly and also use the traditional cloud applications for storage, machine learning (ML) for video analysis, process modeling, and deeper analysis.

Industry: Chemicals

IoT cloud provider: Microsoft Azure

Outcomes:

• Leak sensors now deployed to places difficult, dangerous, or costly to monitor with people
• Human-trained AI continuously improving ability to identifying leaks 
• Success with leak detection spurring development of systems for PPE protection and security monitoring

Read the full Dow and Microsoft Azure case study.

5. Thermo Fisher

Thermo Fisher manufactures equipment used in laboratory research worldwide. Their equipment could sequence the 3.2 billion base pairs in DNA, but the PCs that ran Thermo Fisher software were insufficient in capability for this information flow.  

“We looked at trying to build our own cloud,” says Mark Field, CTO at Thermo Fisher Scientific. “Very quickly, we said … this is not our core competency to run massive cloud infrastructure.”

Instead, they partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a private cloud environment for Thermo Fisher. Equipment now forwards data directly to this cloud, instead of to local PCs, to harness scale and improve collaboration.

Industries: Biotechnology, manufacturing

IoT cloud provider: AWS

Outcomes:

• Over 1,000 partner organizations now feed information into the Thermo Fisher cloud
• Initially, the cloud IoT data expands the reach of supercomputing to all researchers instead of a few
• DNA sequencing will allow a future of more customized care for patients

Watch the full presentation from Thermo Fisher about their AWS partnership.

See more: Best IoT Platforms & Software