Nokia’s main factory in Finland, powered by its own technology, generated productivity gains of 30 percent and 50 percent savings in time of product delivery to market.
Nokia is positioning itself as the leading provider of private wireless networks. The Finnish infrastructure company has already updated its own manufacturing to take advantage of the new technologies, including 4.9G and LTE.
According to Nokia, their Oulu factory produces 1,000 4G and 5G base stations per day. The upgrade to 4.9G and LTE private networks generated significant annual improvements: over 30 percent productivity gains and 50 percent savings in time of product delivery to market, a yearly cost savings of millions of euros.
Demonstrated use cases in Oulu pre-production factory include:
- Virtualization of new product introduction (NPI)
- Flexible robotics to ensure high-productivity and agility for continuous new ramp-ups
- 9G/LTE Private wireless network to speed up NPI line re-layout
- Cloud-based digital data control, enabling real-time process management
- No-touch internal logistics automation via connected mobile robots
To learn more about Nokia’s private network offerings, and the benefits for industrial IoT, we talked to Karl Bream, Vice President, Strategy, Portfolio, and Alliances.
This is the first part of our interview with Karl Bream, where we talk about the industrial benefits of 5G and LTE. In the second part, we’ll discuss Nokia’s offerings of private networks.
IoT Times
We’ve seen a lot of interest in private wireless networks, especially for the industrial IoT market. Can you tell us about Nokia’s offerings in this area?
Karl Bream
First of all, you hit the nail on the head. Obviously, private networks are a hot topic. We really see in the market a private wireless inflection point, if you will. Up to now, private wireless networks have been focused on IT applications, and many industrial applications have been mostly using fixed connections, or not connected at all.
IoT Times
Non IoT specific LTE (4G) networks have been around for several years, and now, in some regions, we’re starting to see 5G commercial launches. What are the latest LTE versions for IoT (LTE-M and NB-IoT), plus 5G, bring to the industrial market?
Karl Bream
What LTE and 5G bring are predictable capabilities. And I think that’s the key part, the predictability, because LTE and 5G networks bring ultra-reliability, ultra-low latency, and increased bandwidth.
They do that predictably. And when you talk about industrial networks, the predictability of the performance is the crucial thing. As manufacturers, for example, go from making one thing a million times to mass customization, which is a million different things, they need to reconfigure their production lines and applications. In a fixed environment, that takes a lot of time. Now they’re looking at wireless, but they need predictable reliability, and performance, in their wireless connectivity.
As these industries change, they’re looking for a new level of capability, if you will, in wireless. This is the point that we’re at today. This is the inflection point, we believe with private wireless, because we see the benefits of industrial-grade private wireless now from various industrial segments that are implementing industry 4.0, and digital transformations as a whole.
IoT Times
Can we say that LTE is already providing most of those capabilities, and 5G will provide the specific needs for more critical applications?
Karl Bream
We found that LTE provides a high percentage of predictable performance use cases to these customers. And, many of the customers can get started today, they can start getting the value immediately in their private LTE deployments, but they also can transition to 5G.
And we, at Nokia, have 5G deployments as well that are ramping up right now. But they can start with LTE, and transition to 5G for the use cases that need 5G features as we go forward.
IoT Times
We see some industries and manufacturers that are just starting to connect their existing equipment. Many of those costly machines are not connected, and are not ready to be replaced. How do you see those industries moving to cellular?
Karl Bream
I’d start with ourselves, and why we made the transformation in our manufacturing plant in Oulu, Finland. There, obviously, we want to implement and get the value because we’re an industry 4.0 company.
We went ahead and implemented both an LTE and a 4.9G network in our plant there. And now, we’re seeing 30% increases in productivity and plant overall.
Also, because now we can do the visual inspection in the factory, the quality has improved by 50%. So our process defects that have gone down there, and the speed at which we can do our production line changes, has increased by 90%. We’ve really transformed our own factory by implementing these technologies.
I believe that, yes, there’re always early adopters, and there’s always, you know, the mass market and so on. I think the early adopters are being the ones that feel the pain the most, if you will, or see the value in implementing these technologies to get that productivity increase.
But you’re absolutely correct. There are some [legacy equipment] brownfield factories, they’re going to sweat the assets, they might depreciate the assets for 30 or 40 years, those assets will be in place.
And while they can, we have customers that implement sensors and things like that on their existing production lines. They use mobile technology for the environment around the production line such as [Automated guided vehicles] AGVs, security cameras, doors, those kinds of things, but their production line is set, they still make a million of one thing in that business. And they’ll continue to have that brownfield wired connectivity for an extended period of time.
The inflection point is now, here’s when it changes. This will be an opportunity for companies to update their assets, and they’ll be doing this for 10, 20, even 30 years as they change some of these long live production systems.
Stay tuned for part 2 of our interview with Karl Bream.