Getting Started
Your data is instantly accessible within the Braincube platform once it is securely shared with your allocated team. Because Braincube is compatible with any system, we extract your data, structure it, and release it for your use.
It takes anywhere from 1 week to a month to build your Digital Twin. The Digital Twin is a contextualized data module that continuously updates in live time. Building your Digital Twin includes pulling your data from the various systems, structuring your data through Braincube middleware, and providing you with a clean data set for your use.
Once this process is complete, you are able to use the 70+ OI Apps to optimize your production line. There is no limit to the amount of Braincube users, so all necessary employees from operator to C-suite can get instant access to everything they need from day one with Braincube.
And because you’ll continue to see value from using Braincube, you can use it for short-term and complex projects. Our customers often use Braincube in their daily habits. Braincube becomes a visualization tool at the plants, data analysis tool for engineers, and a KPI reporting and monitoring tool for corporate team members.
A Braincube rollout is usually part of a wide corporate initiative such as Industry 4.0, a sustainability project, or general continuous improvement efforts. These initiatives use Big Data, Machine Learning, and advanced analytics. Having efforts led by corporate and supported by the plant will help pave the way for a successful implementation.
For your corporate rollout, you will have a designated team of Braincube experts. This team includes data architects, consultants, process coaches, and business developers. They will partner with you and ensure you are set up for success. Your SMEs and process experts are part of the rollout phase because they have the best on-the-ground understanding of your operations. Including them in this process will help everyone get up to speed on the Braincube system.
In addition to corporate support, we recommend having a designated Braincube champion at each factory site. This individual will help lead your change management and corporate strategy. Once Braincube is used throughout all of your sites, the Braincube platform gives you a centralized location for all of your data so that you can share and implement knowledge, best practices, and other analyses across multiple sites.
Our solutions were designed to align with your level of connectivity. From Edge to Cloud to Platform, we have a variety of choices so you can choose the package that fits your needs.
Our starter connectivity packages can help you with data collection, visualization, soft sensors, and more. Whereas our most robust offer includes an autonomous plant, which sends the exact operating conditions from the Braincube platform to your machines.
See our solutions to learn more.
Braincube’s Digital Twin Build
A Digital Twin built by Braincube is a contextualized data model of one of your production lines. We extract data from your existing systems (ERP, Historian, etc.), create a time-based association for each variable, and build a continuously updated model of your production line, at the product level. This allows you to move from time-based association analysis into production-based analysis so that you can optimize, innovate, or improve customer satisfaction using your data.
Your Digital Twin will allow you to move from a rough approximation of what might be happening, to understanding what is happening and what would happen if a variable changed. We take into account time lag, flow, and incorporate relevant parameters from raw materials to finished product. Because this data is continuously structured through our middleware, you will always be able to see your production in real-time.
At the end of a product’s production cycle, the Digital Twin provides you with batch and/or product traceability. This provides you with insight into the exact conditions that were used for a specific roll of paper, a batch of tires, or a set of shingles.
Digital Twins serve as a critical and complementary layer of your industrial transformation strategy. Braincube-powered Digital Twins live within your Braincube IIoT Platform. This provides an easy, secure, centralized database that can be accessed from anywhere you have an industrial network.
Collecting and centralizing all the IT/OT data in an accessible and secured platform is crucial, but the Digital Twin is the next step. A product Digital Twin gives you access to “ready-to-use” data. This data is continuously cleaned and structured into meaningful information for your teams to do their jobs better and easier. How data is used, consumed, and shared directly impacts employee morale, customer satisfaction, and your bottom line.
Unlike many other Digital Twin providers, we offer a continuous experience for accessing and using the Digital Twin database. Braincube-powered Digital Twins automate the structuration of production data and time series data. This allows users to quickly identify and analyze opportunities for improving their manufacturing processes.
Choose from 28 ready-to-use apps, including our best-in-class Advanced Analysis App which leverages CrossRank AI to identify impacting variables on your business objective and receive optimal setpoints. All of this is within a comprehensive IIoT platform.
To understand the opportunities your Braincube Digital Twins bring, it’s critical to understand how they are made. Braincube-built Digital Twins are built by product. This means that each process parameter involved in the manufacturing of every single product (e.g. batch, serial number, sku, or individual product) is automatically structured and available for 24/7 access.
To best explain how a Digital Twin is built, let’s see how one would be built for paper manufacturers. There is an established digital model built by finished product: for example, a roll of paper. For every additional roll of paper produced on that line, a Digital Twin is produced simultaneously. The end result is a continuously-updated database of thousands (or even millions) of Digital Twins, representing the exact conditions of production for each physical finished product.
Braincube’s teams work with you from the very start to create a digital process map. Our proven framework integrates relevant systems, assets, and other data points into a continuously-updated, dynamic Digital Twin of the exact manufacturing conditions for every product made.
A Braincube-built Digital Twin isn’t stagnant. They change and evolve to match your true production cycles. This means that they are always updated to reflect changing production conditions and kept up-to-date via tagging. Custom, automated lag time calculations help you go beyond understanding what happened: you can know why something happened.
At Braincube, you will have a team of designated data architects, consultants, and process experts, who will work with you to create a blueprint of your entire production process, which is then used to build a Digital Twin of your product. We are the only company in the world to build a Digital Twin that is continuously updated in real-time, using a proprietary lag time formula.
Depending on the complexity of your process, this may be several thousand variables to consider. Braincube analyzes your raw material suppliers, weather, machine age, shifts, and more when we gather your data. Your contextualized data module combines raw data and metadata, while also pulling your process information from all systems, people, and things used in your process.
Braincube dynamically calculates lag time of flow, storage, and transportation so that you have the cleanest data set possible. Unique to the Braincube process is the consideration of time on your process, which gives you an exact representation of your production process. Once your data is mapped within the data transformation model, we then structure your data through Braincube middleware into your Digital Twin so it can be transformed into interconnected data that can be used for further analysis, decision making, and innovation. Your Digital Twin will continuously update in live time, giving you access to data whenever you need it so that you can find the optimal operating conditions based on past performance, troubleshoot, innovate, perform predictive maintenance, find new revenue streams and more.
Braincube doesn’t just link your data: it interconnects your data to give you cleaner, more valuable data. Braincube calculates lag time of flow, storage, and transportation so that you have the cleanest data set possible: your digital data set is a true mirror image of what is happening at the plant. Our consideration of time on your process is unique to Braincube and ultimately gives you an exact representation of your production process.
Oftentimes, a ‘Digital Twin’ is built by asset or factory and often have a long lag time from when the information is collected to when it is available and are also not continuously structured with live, real-time data. These contextualized data models usually separate out each step of the production process, treating one process’ output variable as the input variable of the next process. When the process is broken into steps, you can only examine which key output variables from the upstream process impact your outputs. You cannot examine the production process as a whole entity, which is why customers find so much value in their Braincube Digital Twin.
By analyzing the key parameters of your process (including raw material suppliers, weather, machine age, and shift details), we are able to build an exact model of your production line and connect each and every parameter necessary to optimize your process. Your contextualized data module combines raw data and metadata, while also pulling in your process information from all systems, people, and things used in your process.
Braincube’s templated Digital Twin build process only takes a few weeks to bridge the gap between IT/OT systems, streamline calculations, and ensure the process map is accurately reflected. Our customers report seeing value from their completed Digital Twins within weeks (sometimes days!) of using their apps that leverage their Digital Twin database.
A Braincube Digital Twin can be used for several manufacturing use cases. These include quality inspection, supply chain coordination, or Big Data and AI/Machine Learning uses for problem solving.
Implementation:
As with any new system, we’ll work with you to develop a global rollout plan. Our experience in change management and implementation at large companies allows us to build a strategy that works for your company’s culture. Our Braincube consultants will ensure you are trained on Braincube’s technology and the methodology.
We often hear that plant employees are happy to use Braincube. They can be more efficient and are grateful to learn new manufacturing skills that they can apply towards their future careers.
Since we utilize your historical data to propose the best operating conditions, plants have a direct role in influencing successful changes to your production process. Our visual dashboards provide an easy to follow guide for operators, helping them to stay compliant, improve output, and reduce waste.
Braincube was designed to work in tandem with your historian to deliver more value to the data you are already collecting. Because a historian collects more information than you may need for analysis, Braincube takes the pertinent data and structures it into usable, clean data.
For clients who are not using an existing historian, they do find that Braincube can help them collect, store, and historize data. Ultimately, Braincube will help you get the most value out of your data, whether it’s collected through your existing applications or collected through Braincube.
Many of our end users are in fact data scientists. Braincube affords them the opportunity to save time on the tedious process of pulling data from different systems, configuring it appropriately, and then running analysis on various systems. Because Braincube offers ready to use apps as well as an API, data scientists can spend their time fixing problems, instead of fixing data.
Braincube calculates lag time of flow, storage, and transportation so that you can more easily link upstream changes to process outputs. Unique to the Braincube process is the consideration of time on your process, which gives you a digital representation of your production process. Once your data is mapped, we then structure your data through Braincube middleware. This makes it possible to transform the structured data into interconnected data that can be used for further analysis, decision making, and innovation.
Your Digital Twin will continuously update in live time, giving you access to data whenever you need it, without the long process needed for data manipulation. This real-time access to your production line enables you to troubleshoot, perform predictive maintenance, find new revenue streams, and more.
First, we have a comprehensive engagement plan that helps us understand how we can cater to your business objectives. The demonstrator phase is an opportunity for you to get familiar with the Braincube suite so you can prepare for a global rollout. The project phase connects and associates your data so that you can standardize usage, operations, and best practices for short and long-term projects. At the end of the project phase, you will have a sampling of Braincube’s capacities that you can use as a proof to work towards your organization’s actual need.
Braincube has worked with more than 250 companies in more than 30 countries to help them transform their data and move into Industry 4.0. We focus on complex manufacturing processes in both continuous and discrete manufacturing. We’ve worked across all verticals of manufacturing including chemical, food, consumer packaged goods, paper, and oil and gas.
Security + Data Protection
Braincube works with your IT team to extract the data from your systems. This process can be done in a continuous capacity (i.e., extract one data point every minute) or by historical capacity (i.e., extract all the data since a given date, such as January 1, 2019).
Braincube is fully compatible with legacy systems, making this process as seamless as possible. Connectors for many common data storage systems (i.e., OPC DA/HDA, MySQL) are compatible with Braincube.
After your data is extracted, your files are sent to the Cloud using either HTTPS or SFTP, both of which are secure and encrypted file transfer methods.
We are ISO-27001 certified and take all necessary precautions to protect your company’s data. Your data is stored in our cloud on its own virtual machine; there is no risk of someone from another customer accessing your Braincube.
All data transfer (both internally and externally) is done with encrypted file transfer protocols (either HTTPS or SFTP). The Braincube team’s access to your data is restricted to only the internal individuals who need to work on it. All parties with access are trained on the NDA that was signed with your company.
The majority of our servers are stored just north of Paris in a secure location. We partner with a renowned data center company that has 145 data centers in 15 different countries. Most of the companies we work with prefer to keep their content in our data center, but we also offer on-prem and private cloud storage options for those that prefer these methods.
About Braincube:
Braincube has more than 150 employees working in France, Brazil, Thailand, and the United States. See our current job postings.
Braincube was created in 2007 by three manufacturing engineers from France. They wanted to empower companies around the globe to utilize their data to make better, faster decisions. They knew all too well the challenge of pulling data from isolated systems, putting it together for analysis, and spending time crunching the numbers to determine root causes that help their plants run as lean as possible. However, they also knew that the challenge of processing vast amounts of data could not be completed by the human mind alone.
They knew there was a better way! Braincube’s co-founders developed a platform, powered by a proprietary algorithm, that focused on understanding the impact that interconnected variables had on production line optimization. Instead of focusing on what doesn’t work, or what might happen in the future, the Braincube IIoT platform and applications help companies repeat the best of their past. This enables companies to make their best attempt, their every attempt.
We empower companies to autonomously run analysis with clean data and adjust the most impactful parameters determined by Braincube’s proprietary AI: the CrossRank Analysis. For the past decade, Braincube has partnered with manufacturing companies to help them transform into Industry 4.0.
