For some, it’s a matter of designing processes more efficiently, or boosting productivity. Others believe that the greatest benefit of IIoT systems like MindSphere is that they increase product quality, raise service and maintenance to a new level, and simplify them tremendously. And then there are those who value the IIoT because it improves collaboration across locations or even companies and allows them to define and better track KPIs – or even to create new, digitally based business models. Last but not least, many glass manufacturers are optimizing their production to reduce resource consumption.

The cloud is the medium of choice for saving their generated data, say many customers, above all because it also adequately addresses important topics like security, data privacy, and compliance. Cloud services undoubtedly offer other benefits as well.

MindSphere in particular offers a broad range of protocol options for device and enterprise applications, applications for the glass industry, comprehensive analyses, and an innovative development environment that uses the open PaaS (open platform as a service) functions from Siemens and provides access to cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba.  
MindSphere also makes it possible to connect products, plants, and machines located around the world to a central cloud location, which ensures high transparency in plant operations. The successful mastery of digitalization using an IoT platform requires companies to establish iterative connections to various PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) tools. This improves data collection, processing, analysis, and utilization.

What matters is shared, cost-effective data storage that allows companies to use less of their own resources for hardware and software maintenance, among other benefits.