Many manufacturing companies have accelerated their digital transformation in recent years, often starting with individual production lines or plants. The real hurdle often emerges in the next step: global scaling. Diverse IT and OT landscapes, varying system versions, and local infrastructures complicate uniform deployment. Every subsequent rollout thus risks becoming yet another standalone IT project, with the corresponding effort required for integration, maintenance, and operation.
“Today, the industry faces less of an innovation problem than a scaling problem. Companies know exactly what added value digital solutions can create in production. However, it is crucial not to isolate successful approaches to individual plants, but to roll them out quickly and reliably on a broad scale,” explains Martin Heinz, CEO of iTAC Software AG. “This requires a technological foundation that functions uniformly across locations while offering sufficient flexibility for local requirements.”
A technological standard for different plants
With the iTAC.MOM.Suite powered by Red Hat OpenShift, a common technological foundation has been created for this purpose, which is now being extended to the entire iTAC software ecosystem. The architecture supports various operating models, ranging from the edge to on-premises environments and into the cloud.
Manufacturing companies can thus run applications – depending on requirements for latency, cost, performance, or data sovereignty – wherever it makes sense for the specific use case. Sensitive production data, for example, can remain locally at the plant, while selected data is made available in the cloud for cross-plant analyses.
At the same time, existing virtualized applications and modern containerized services can be run on a shared infrastructure. This means companies do not necessarily have to replace established systems in order to gradually modernize their manufacturing IT. Especially in production environments that have evolved over time, this facilitates the integration of legacy and new systems.
Software operations can also be largely standardized and automated. As the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift automatically handles recurring tasks such as deployment, updates, patching, and scaling. These capabilities help minimize manual effort required – particularly during staging, testing, and rollout – from several weeks to one or two days in iTAC deployments, enabling more predictable and faster deployment processes. Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift enables organizations to more consistently manage backend services and software updates across disparate production sites, further reducing the risk of manual configuration errors.
“Global manufacturing companies need an infrastructure that combines centralized standards with the necessary autonomy of individual plants. This enables them to maintain production continuity regardless of unplanned downtime and more consistently manage software across remote edge locations,” says Kelly Switt, senior director, Intelligent Edge and Industrial Business Lead, Red Hat. “Red Hat OpenShift provides the standardized, open foundation that is necessary for manufacturers to scale into the future.”
From MOM to a unified software ecosystem
The collaboration extends beyond the iTAC.MOM.Suite. iTAC has also aligned the specialized solutions in its software ecosystem with the shared Red Hat OpenShift reference architecture. These include Cogiscan for vendor-neutral machine integration, DUALIS with GANTTPLAN for Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS), and Accevo with solutions for the process industry.
These solutions allow different levels of production – from planning and machine connectivity to production control – to operate on the same technological foundation. Instead of setting up and continuously maintaining different infrastructure concepts for individual applications, a unified architectural model is created, which reduces the complexity of the IT landscape and facilitates the interaction between the various applications.
For companies with international operations, utilizing a unified architectural model is particularly relevant when rolling out systems to additional plants. Proven software configurations can be standardized and deployed to other locations, while local requirements can still be accommodated. This eliminates the need for IT and OT teams to set up and maintain different environments from scratch for each plant.
Scaling AI from pilot projects to full deployment
The importance of a standardized infrastructure also becomes clear when deploying data-driven applications and AI. “Many companies are currently testing solutions for predictive maintenance, intelligent quality analysis, or AI-based assistance functions, initially in individual production areas. But even here, a successful PoC alone does not determine the future economic benefits. The real challenge lies in subsequently rolling out such applications to additional production lines and plants securely and at a reasonable cost,” says Martin Heinz.
To achieve this, data and applications must be reliably available across the machine level, the edge, the data center, and the cloud. At the same time, sensitive production data cannot be transferred to the cloud at will for compliance, latency, or security reasons. The architecture that iTAC has built in collaboration with Red Hat makes it possible to run workloads where they are needed, depending on the specific requirements. For example, AI inference can take place directly at the edge, while selected data is used in the cloud for cross-system analyses.
Martin Heinz explains: “Our goal is to ensure that companies don’t have to start from scratch with every new plant or use case. We therefore provide a standardized foundation on which existing systems can be expanded and new features brought into production more quickly. In this way, we give our customers’ ongoing digital transformation an additional boost.”
