Microsoft and the BMW Group announces Open Manufacturing Platform to modernize factories

At Hannover Messe conference today, Microsoft and the BMW Group announced a new initiative bring latest innovations to the manufacturing sector. The new initiative is called Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP), as the name suggests it is an open technology framework that support the development of smart factory solutions. This framework will be shared by OMP participants across the automotive and broader manufacturing sectors. This new platform is powered by the Microsoft Azure industrial IoT cloud platform. It is important to note that recently AWS announced a similar partnership with Volkswagen group to modernize its manufacturing process.

What is OMP?

• The OMP is intended to provide community members with a reference architecture with open source components based on open industrial standards and an open data model.
• In addition to facilitating collaboration, this platform approach is designed to unlock and standardize data models that enable analytics and machine learning scenarios — data that has traditionally been managed in proprietary systems.
• Utilizing industrial use cases and sample code, community members and other partners will have the capability to develop their own services and solutions while maintaining control over their data.

The BMW group will contribute some initial use cases to the OMP community. The recruitment of additional partners for OMP is happening right now. The OMP Advisory Board will be in operation with an initial set of four to six partners in place and a minimum of 15 use cases rolled out into select production environments by the end of 2019. Microsoft and the BMW Group is now inviting other manufacturers and suppliers to join the community.

Source: Microsoft