Where can discrete manufacturers go to find an MES/MOM solution developed by manufacturers with nearly a decade of production usage and experience as a multi-tenant cloud solution? 42Q, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sanmina Corporation, is an obvious choice. They provide:
- Smart Factory, a fully featured MES/MOM solution,
- Connected Manufacturing, providing real-time visibility across diverse supply chains, regardless of the MES environment,
- Xcelerators, which quickly digitize specific operational areas in your manufacturing ecosystem and, most recently,
- Xconnect, a low-code-driven robust backend service, is designed to simply, seamlessly, and securely bridge the gap between customers’ enterprise systems and the dynamic factory floor.
- To top it off, they have also released Arthur, a GenAI-based chatbot.
Origins and Smart Manufacturing Evolution
As pioneers in the multi-tenant cloud MES world, they faced challenges from skeptics who believed cloud hosting was inappropriate for MES. However, the broad functionality developed over the years for Sanmina was instantly available for 42Q clients. This was not a ‘minimally viable product’ at launch; it was a battle-tested solution with decades of use in multiple industries across a global footprint.
Xcelerators and Deployment Expertise
MES implementations have always been resource-intensive, long, and complicated. In surveys conducted for MESA International over seven years, the results showed MES implementations averaged between 12 and 18 months, and year to year, this average showed no sign of dropping. 42Q’s answer to this decades-old problem is their Xcelerators, including Digital Factory Xcelerator, eDHR Xcelerator, OEE Xcelerator, CMMS Xcelerator, and IIoT Xcelerator, all designed to meet a time-to-value of 90 days. Customers give 42Q high marks for quick response and quick delivery of solutions, as well as a willingness to collaborate and to take the time to understand the customer’s business and unique challenges. 42Q was quick to diagnose and troubleshoot issues, even issues unrelated to the 42Q platform. Of course, as a multi-tenant cloud solution, there is a massive deployment time advantage over on-premises systems regarding multisite deployments. These Xcelerators have been applied in multiple industries, including automotive, aerospace and defense, medical devices, high tech electronics, communication networks, and other discrete industrial settings.
Connected Manufacturing and Data Consolidation
Another advantage 42Q brings to the market is Connected Manufacturing, the infrastructure to create a single data pipeline to consolidate operational data. It streamlines operations by integrating data from all suppliers’ locations, offering a unified, single-pane-of-glass view, empowering teams with insights to make informed decisions and optimize global operations. A customer reported that 42Q has allowed them to consolidate data from their global factories and to support a data pipeline into their manufacturing data lake for analysis at scale. Customers can use this not only to identify quality issues but also to support benchmarking. Connected Manufacturing can also be used to discover emerging best practices at a local level that can be leveraged globally.
These capabilities are not limited to the 42Q applications umbrella. Connected Manufacturing can be implemented even in supplier networks where some suppliers do not use 42Q, enabling unified benchmarking and analytics.
Xconnect
Xconnect, announced this year at the Hanover Messe show, is a backend service designed to bridge the gap between customers’ enterprise systems and the factory floor. It securely links ERP and customer systems with factory equipment, machines, and IIoT devices for bidirectional data flow.
Xconnect is a data integration tool at the core of 42Q’s smart manufacturing strategy. It provides a flexible, no-code/low-code solution for connecting and transforming data from various sources, enabling visibility, automating controls and empowering decision makers across your manufacturing ecosystem.
Arthur – a Chatbot with 30 years of manufacturing experience
Chatbots have become relatively common, especially in customer service. Their performance can be spotty, often due to training the bots using large language models. Manufacturers may be skeptical of the maturity and value of these chatbots, and fearful of the widely reported hallucinations from commercial GenAI systems like Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude from Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, and Meta AI.
42Q has released their own Chatbot, Arthur. Arthur has been trained in the 42Q Content Hub and Learning Management System, leveraging 30 years of global manufacturing expertise. Powered by the advanced Claude Sonnet LLM and orchestrated by Amazon Bedrock, Arthur provides accurate, context-rich responses through Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Arthur is multilingual, context-aware, and can interpret data in any language or format. Consider Arthur, the knowledgeable senior shop expert who can quickly evaluate an issue based on their experience and offer alternative approaches for solving problems, ensuring reliable, actionable insights without the risks associated with general-purpose GenAI.
Thank you, Wellington Giolo, for the detailed briefing.
