The benefits of cloud technology extend beyond web projects, as demonstrated by its application in real-world sectors such as manufacturing.

Take this example: at our client’s manufacturing plant, there was this massive pipe-rolling line.

A large chunk of iron—what they call a pig of iron—goes through numerous production stages, eventually transforming into sheet metal. For the end product, this sheet metal is then rolled and welded into a 5-foot (1.5 meter)-diameter pipe, ready for use in the gas industry.

At each stage of the production cycle, some percentage of rejects is inevitable. The pipe has to be re-smelted and sent through again, incurring cost at every step. Reducing rejects saves money and improves quality.

Each production unit is outfitted with various sensors that collect raw data such as temperature at input and output, speed of stage completion, among other metrics. The client aimed to pour all this data into a so-called data lake in the cloud, to stream each type of data from the production cycle.

This integration could allow them to leverage business intelligence and analytics to extract meaningful insights from the collected data, find patterns, and experiment with process adjustments, like tweaking the temperature of a specific step.

Although the client’s company had skilled IT engineers, they lacked specific training in cloud services and were unfamiliar with data lakes and their implementation. Thus the pipe-rolling company turned to us for consulting in order to understand the principles and how to build the right architecture.

Because of the confidential nature of the plant’s production, the exact numbers could not be publicly disclosed. However, some time after the project’s completion, we received positive feedback on the outcome, including indirect confirmations of a successful reduction in defect percentage, cost improvements, enhanced quality, and a further streamlined production process.