Aptiv, formerly called Delphi, sees themselves as a company that addresses urban mobility challenges. When you look at population increases that are coming in the next decade, it becomes clear that innovation is needed in mobility.

“Today, our portfolio consists mostly of what we call Smart Vehicle Architecture and Smart Mobility Solutions,” said Steve Hutchins, Chief Engineer of Manufacturing Information Systems at Aptiv. This includes things like automated driving, but goes beyond those features to comprehensive mobility experiences.

This innovation requires Aptiv to push the envelope in its manufacturing. A key challenge was getting actionable data into the right hands across a diverse global enterprise. With over two million transactions spread over 74 servers across the globe, a lot of time is spent finding information and tracking down who owns it.

To address these challenges, Aptiv decided to build a global manufacturing intelligence portal, and it conducted a thorough discovery process for the project. It knew that it wanted to streamline and co-locate all of its data with a best-in-class portal platform, and that it would need a development partner that could act as a thought leader to guide them. Aptiv decided on partnering with Youngsoft to deliver a new solution on Liferay.

A One Stop Shop for Global Intelligence

Traditionally, Aptiv employees needed to be within a plant in order to access information. A major goal of the new solution was to break down these silos and create a true omnichannel experience that allowed employees to access information anywhere, without fiddling with VPNs and without risking data security.

The manufacturing intelligence portal achieved this with a number of features. For instance, to solve the limited visibility that managers had for daily regional and global trends for daily targets, they automated the consolidation of systems and exposed revenue goals to the right people.

They were also able to deliver real time production data on screens that are placed throughout their plants, so that employees always have accurate information in front of them as they work. This completely digitized the manual process of logging this information and consolidating it for global plants. Data from every global transaction is streamed into a data lake, which is displayed in a dashboard that is available on any device, anywhere.

Another key feature that Aptiv was able to develop was targeted alarming for manufacturing plants. “Historically, when alarms go off in plants, everyone hears them,” said Hutchins. “With the portal, we’ve identified the right equipment and users, and built targeted alarming that gets alerts to the right person.” These alerts can be anything from email to push notifications to alarm lights within plants.

As we heard in another session, the trends in manufacturing can be seen as a risk or a possibility for organizations. Aptiv’s solution shows that IT leaders can bring emerging technologies together and deliver powerful solutions that solve business problems, in ways we never used to think were possible.