Customer profile
Seeing the big picture
Omneo, a SaaS big data analytics solution from Siemens PLM Software, uses the
Dell | Cloudera Hadoop Big Data Solution, accelerated by Intel, to help companies
gain a 360-degree view of their supply chains by accessing billions of product data
records in seconds.
Company Siemens PLM
Software
Industry Manufacturing & Supply Chain
Country United States
Website siemens.com/plm
Business need
To enable global-brand owners to
manage product performance and the
customer experience, Siemens PLM
Software needed to collect, manage,
search and analyze vast amounts
of diverse data types, and it sought
the right software and hardware
infrastructure to support this effort.
Solution
The organization worked with Dell
and Cloudera to build a software
solution on top of the Cloudera®
Distribution of Hadoop® (CDH)
platform running on a cluster of Dell
PowerEdge C8220 servers, giving
customers total product data visibility
throughout their entire supply chains.
Benefits
“We are able to help customers search billions
of records in seconds with Dell infrastructure
and support, Cloudera’s Hadoop solution, and
our knowledge of supply chain and product
performance intelligence. That’s a powerful
combination for our customers.”
Dave Mitchell, CTO, Cloud Services, Siemens PLM Software
• Provides a 360-degree view
of supply chain, product and
customer data
• Searches billions of data records in
seconds
• Scales to support 1 billion new
records every month
• Helps pinpoint emerging issues
within the supply chain
• Saves millions of dollars and boosts
productivity
• Improves product performance and
the customer experience
Solutions at a glance
• Big Data
Every day, manufacturers deliver millions of electronic devices
and other products to customers throughout the world. But
as customers become increasingly global and supply chains
become more dependent on partner networks, manufacturers
face a big challenge: identifying risks to product quality.
“With the visibility
provided by the
Omneo solution,
brand owners can
consistently deliver
better products.
That means you can
be more responsive
to your customers’
experience.”
Bill Boswell, Senior Director
Marketing and Business Strategy,
Cloud Services, Siemens PLM
Software
“So much can go wrong, because you
have hundreds of millions of components
being sourced globally, put together and
pushed through distribution channels
to customers,” says Bill Boswell, senior
director marketing and business strategy,
cloud services, Siemens PLM Software.
In such a complex environment,
determining sources of risk is particularly
difficult because many companies do
not have a single place to view all their
supply chain data. “The data needed to
make decisions is all over the place, with
different partners and in different formats,
and much of it is inconsistent as a result,”
Boswell says. “Also, the volume of data
is rapidly growing, so companies need
one, unified place to search and analyze
billions of records.”
In an effort to address these challenges,
Siemens PLM Software wanted to develop
a new software solution that would give
companies an end-to-end, holistic view
of all product and supply chain data.
However, the company soon realized
that creating the solution with its existing
relational database management system
was not going to work.
Choosing the Hadoop platform and Dell
technologies
The Omneo team evaluated five of
the six largest data processing and
storage technologies, and the company
concluded that a solution based on
Apache™ Hadoop® was the best fit in
terms of performance, scalability and total
cost of ownership. “Hadoop gave us the
best cost-to-performance relationship
and could handle large volumes of data
and allow us to find the right big data
Products & Services
Hardware
Dell PowerEdge C8000 Series
4U chassis
Dell PowerEdge C8220
compute nodes
Dell PowerEdge C8220X Series
worker nodes
Dell Networking S4810
10/40GbE switches
Partner
Hadoop platform:
- Cloudera Enterprise
“That technology was designed for
transactional data processing, not for
massive analysis of that data,” says Dave
Mitchell, CTO, Cloud Services, Siemens
PLM Software. “We experimented with
relational databases, but we hit a wall.
Data volumes from our customers were
exceeding the system’s limitations. We
knew we needed to find the right bigdata architecture to support the solution
we wanted to build.”
2
Hadoop components:
- Data Operating System
- Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop
- Cloudera Search
- Cloudera Impala
- Linux CentOS
solution,” Mitchell says. “It also gave us the
opportunity to use cost-effective, highly
scalable hardware architectures.”
Once it decided on Hadoop software,
Siemens PLM Software then needed
to choose the infrastructure behind its
solution. “Early on in the process, we
realized we needed a high-performing,
scalable infrastructure,” says Manash
Chakraborty, VP, Omneo Business &
Market Development, Siemens PLM
Software. That led Siemens PLM Software
to Dell. “We were already working with
Dell on a supplier quality initiative,” he
says. “Because of that relationship, we
were able to meet with Dell’s server
engineers and optimize the solution’s
configuration.”
Dell representatives suggested that
Siemens PLM Software implement Dell
PowerEdge C8220 2-socket servers,
powered by Intel® Xeon® E5-2600
processors, for the PowerEdge C8000
Series 4U chassis. “The C8220 platform
was uniquely designed to meet the
performance requirements Siemens PLM
Software was looking for,” says Michael
Shepherd, a senior product strategist
with Dell. “It had an ideal number
of HDD slots with optimal CPU and
memory configurations to provide highperformance computing at cost-effective
rates.”
and loads it into the Hadoop Distributed
File System (HDFS). The data is then
transformed, contextualized and analyzed
using tools to support different workloads.
For example, the Hadoop MapReduce
software framework is used to transform
the data into any structure needed so
it can be manipulated, and the Apache
HBase™ columnar store offers an easy
way for users to access specific records in
real time. The application uses Cloudera
search technology to quickly index all
the raw data into a format that makes
sense for users. Customers can access
the Cloudera enterprise data hub (EDH)
through an Omneo web portal.
The solution ingests millions of data points
for customers each day from dozens of
disparate data sources. Using the solution,
Siemens PLM Software customers can
quickly search, analyze and mine all their
data in a single place, so they can identify
and resolve supply chain and product
performance issues before they negatively
affect customers or sales. By entering
a single serial number, customers can
access the entire history of a part and its
critical subcomponents.
Siemens PLM Software chose to run
its solution on a Hadoop distribution
platform from Cloudera, a Dell partner.
The Cloudera® Distribution of Hadoop
(CDH) platform includes Dell’s tested and
validated reference architecture.
Some of the largest manufacturers in
the world have chosen to implement
the Omneo solution. “The amount of
data the largest companies handle for
decision making and supply chain quality
is enormous,” says Chakraborty. “These
companies want an easier way to get
rapid access to their data so they can
make better decisions. It is all about
accelerating your decision-making
velocity.”
“Cloudera offered strong support, and it
has a significant number of contributors
to the Hadoop project and sub-projects.
With that comes deep technical expertise,”
says Mitchell. “So we really liked the
support and innovation we saw with
Cloudera.” The application, designed
to transform big data into actionable
intelligence, ingests raw manufacturing
data — including factory, supplier, field
services and after-market repair data —
Analyzes billions of records in seconds
Siemens PLM Software customers
can use the new supply chain product
data management solution to get a
360-degree view of supply chain
data — from suppliers, equipment, IoT,
field service and repair operations — that
is easily searchable and quickly accessible.
In fact, one customer searches more
than 6 billion records in seconds using
the Omneo solution. “We are able to
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“Companies want
an easier way to
get rapid access to
their data so they
can make better
decisions. It is all
about accelerating
your decisionmaking velocity.”
Manash Chakraborty, VP, Omneo
Business & Market Development,
Siemens PLM Software
help customers search billions of records
in seconds with Dell infrastructure and
support, Cloudera’s Hadoop solution,
and our knowledge of supply chain
and product performance issues,” says
Mitchell. “That’s a powerful combination
for our customers.”
Several of the largest manufacturers are
taking advantage of the Siemens PLM
Software application to quickly analyze
global product data. “It used to take our
manufacturing test person a week and a
half to analyze factory test times for some
of our products, and he can do it in one
day now because the Omneo system is
so responsive,” says one customer, who
works for a global technology company.
“That really unlocks the potential for
exploring data we otherwise couldn’t.”
The Omneo solution also gives more
people access to supply chain data search
and analysis. “This platform is unique
in that any user can access the website,
point and click, and find what they’re
looking for,” Boswell says. “It no longer
takes a database administrator and IT
requests to get to the data you need.”
Scales to support 1 billion new records a
month
Because the Omneo application is based
on the scalable Hadoop big-data system
and high-performance Dell servers,
customer supply chain data is easily
scalable. “We currently have more than
13 billion data records in the system, and
it can support 1 billion additional new
events per month,” says Mitchell. That
scalability is key for companies needing
in-depth insight into their supply chains.
“It’s one thing if you’re a company that
sells a few thousand units per year, but
if you’re one of the larger companies,
and you’re making and shipping tens
of millions of units a year — each
one possibly having several hundred
components — there is no way you could
possibly identify all the risks associated
with those units without a powerful
solution like this.”
Adds a customer, “It really does come
down to the scale of the data. For
example, I was asked by management to
go into our traditional database system
and break down all the different support
services purchased by customers. But
that’s 38 million records, so I had to break
it down further into about 2 million rows
to begin to process it. And after about
four hours, I came up with only about
four charts. But using the Performance
Analytics application, Omneo generates
and updates these charts for us to simply
monitor.”
Companies can better identify supply
chain issues
With a holistic view of different data sets,
large enterprises can more readily solve
potential supply chain quality problems.
“We have many dispersed product quality
data sets in multiple databases,” the
Siemens PLM Software customer states.
“For instance, if there is a problem with
a product, the employee has to go ask
someone for a summary of the repair or
return data for that product. Then, they’d
have to go find the factory assembly data.
There are so many different pieces, and
you might only find your problem after
weeks or months of searching. We can
quickly span across all our different data
environments with the Omneo solution,
and it’s all pre-aggregated and running
in real time. That has solved some major
data access issues for us, and it’s opening
up an entirely new view of data and
helping us start the process of finding
problems.”
Saves customers millions of dollars and
increases productivity
Having better visibility into supply chain
data helps Siemens PLM Software
customers spend more time resolving
issues and less time identifying them,
which affects revenues and reduces
warranty reserves and liability. For
example, one company has reported total
annual savings of between $15 million and
$25 million because of the new insights it
has gained from the Omneo application.
Companies using the application have
also boosted productivity. “When
thousands of engineers and support
staff are equipped with one common
set of information, they spend up to 70
percent less time searching for data,”
says Boswell. “That unleashes a huge
productivity gain. So when thousands of
practitioners at customer locations are
more productive, they can make faster,
more informed decisions every day about
product performance. With the visibility
provided by this solution, brand owners
can consistently deliver better products.
That means you can be more responsive
to your customers’ experience.”
A partnership based on technology,
support and innovation
Siemens PLM Software plans to enhance
its partnership with Dell and Cloudera
as it seeks to further refine its big data
analytics solution. “This has been a
great experience for all of us, from the
infrastructure and technology to the
overall support we get from Dell,” says
Chakraborty. “We see this as a very
long-term relationship with Dell, as we
grow our business and as Dell brings
more performance and power to the
infrastructure.”
And as Siemens PLM Software, Dell and
Cloudera continue to collaborate, the
organizations expect to offer additional
innovation. “I think we’re at the start of a
multifaceted journey together,” says
Mitchell. Boswell adds, “Looking ahead,
we are excited about delivering product
performance intelligence through highend analytics and advanced visualization.
Companies are just now starting to
predict and proactively correct product
performance issues before they happen.
This next era of big data analytics will have
tremendous impacts for companies and
the customers they serve.”
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Number: 10022791 © March 2016 Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved.