Case Studies

A new name in the hydrogen engine ecosystem, Nuvera approached LHP for a custom telematics offering. This custom telematics solution needed to be fast, event driven, and most importantly responsive. Unlike traditional telematics services, LHP provided both data in real-time on demand (or use case) and every hour to an online dashboard allowing the operators a real time look at all of Nuvera’s test and production assets. In the event of an error the monitoring on that asset triggered the second-by-second data collection, as well as notifying all system operators of the event to help prevent potential hazards. The system could provide data over WiFi and any cellular network to an Azure environment for processing, a web application custom-built for Nuvera, a custom Power Platform collaboration and notification process workflow, and a PowerBI dashboard.

Solutions Built:

1. Microsoft Azure
   
   • Azure Cosmos DB
   • Azure Functions
   • Azure API Management
   • Azure IoT Hub
2. Microsoft Power Platform
3. Microsoft Power BI

Power Apps embedded in Microsoft Teams have been a great workflow solution for our customers. Illustrated below is a solution created for in-the-field technical support that includes real-time notifications based on a continuous IoT feed and a resolution form for the incident.

Two main advantages of implementing a solution as an Embedded Power App in Microsoft Teams:

- The solution is readily accessible to any employee in the company with roles, authorization, and authentication enforced seamlessly without the need to keep a secondary credentials/roles database.

- When embedded in teams, the solution can be accessed from a Desktop, Mobile, or Tablet device inside the corporate buildings or on the go, yet all within the corporate security structure.

Pain: The resolution process was not easily accessible or dynamic.

Value proposition: With Power Apps embedded in Teams all the engineers now have access to the Resolution process from their phones and desktops. In the application they can also find the guidelines needed to diagnose and solve the issue, document the problem, take pictures of the issues and fix, and do the resolution paperwork on-site.

PDK is a skunk works / phantom works / R&D project that the LHP Analytics & IoT team continuously develops as we gain more insights from our customers and needs that may not be easily addressed in the current market. The project allows us to test new technologies, architectures, and/or approaches to solutions in a stress-free environment. New employees or employees rolling off other projects can then contribute to this ever-growing prototype solution. The PDK acronym stands for Project Dark Knight because of specific team members affinity for Batman and is enjoyed by our sales team for the fact it is the same acronym for the greatest transmission in the world, the Porsche PDK. One day we hope this is a product our customers will be using in their environments to drive engineering and revenue!

PDK is a solution designed to standardize Analytics across different teams and/or domains inside companies. For instance, a company that is in the development cycle of a new engine will start by running simulations and analyzing the data, then the engines will be tested under lab conditions where that data will be analyzed again, and finally, real world telemetry data will be collected, stored, and analyzed as well. Three different silos of data with different teams doing different levels of analysis in different geographical locations. Usually each cycle, team, or phase will be conducted differently and that different teams can use different terminology, different scales, and different variables to track.

PDK allows us to re-align those different datasets, measurement systems, and processes and compare them against each other even defining Pass/Fail test criteria when running those comparisons.

Pain: Incongruencies between Simulation, Test, and Production data.

Value proposition: With PDK, data generated by different teams can be cross compared with automated custom test criteria across the datasets creating simple to understand Pass/Fail results.

LHP Analytics partnered with its parent company, LHP Engineering Solutions, to bring this project and document management tool to life. As global leaders in Functional Safety, LHP Engineering Solutions helped us to create the Functional Safety Explorer.

Functional Safety Explorer specializes in assisting manufacturers with compliance with safety standards in a rapidly changing automotive industry. Made for ISO 26262, Functional Safety Explorer makes compliance with this standard as simple as filing your taxes online.

Problem: An everchanging automotive industry is beginning its trend to electric vehicles. However, along with these exciting new developments come bureaucratic nightmares of new regulations and safety requirements.

Solution: Moving your documentation and design planning to Functional Safety Explorer allows you to track your progress and manage your compliance in one place. Functional safety management can now be at your fingertips.

LHP Analytics & IoT has been a consulting leader for Power BI before it was called Power BI – does anyone remember Power View or the still just as powerful Power Pivot? We have been honored to be part of the Power BI ecosystem from its beginning and have a team member who participated in the Microsoft Executive Briefing Council on Analytics and the first iterations of Power BI. We consider ourselves more holistic and well-versed than other consulting companies that simply build dashboards. Our pride comes from building a repeatable data integration process into a well-defined and most importantly well-tested data model, ensuring the proper roles and views, making end-user usability and visualizations appealing and easy to understand, integrating Power BI with Azure / Power Platform / and other solutions, and finally ensuring the infrastructure works on Desktop, on-premise with Report Server, or in the native cloud service.

Embedded Power BI allows for the integration of powerful and complex Power BI dashboards into your company's front-facing tailor made web app created in Angular or React.

The best advantage is the possibility of having insightful and beautiful dashboards and charts combining data from different data sources on your website in a matter of hours or days, instead of the longer process that would take coding a Web API, database connectors, and front-end charts.

Pain: Need for Analytics Dashboards to be made available for collaborators and customers through a centralized website instead of passing around links or attachments.

Value proposition: Ability to take Power BI dashboards and integrate them inside the Company CRM.

LHP helped build a system for ESG (Environmental Social Governance) Reporting to reduce discrimination, to make sure that there is an adequate representation of different social groups, to ensure that corporate ethics are appropriately engaged, to reduce carbon footprint, and to comply with environmental concerns.

A dashboard was built with a custom UI through the web. This would then go to their tier 1 or tier 2 customer so that they can simply plug and play LHP’s solution to monitor their systems and analyze their performance against the environmental parameters. The flexibility of the schemeless system helped the customer to set up their dashboards as per their requirement post-LHP engagement.

Challenges

• Customer required a modeless design to allow their customers to upload any dataset. The LHP team had to account for the types of data that could be uploaded and how to aggregate that data in meaningful ways without a model.

• User-defined thresholds with real-time notifications when the threshold was crossed. Thresholds can be added to charts for visual reference.

Solution

• Architecture for the solution: Angular, .NET (C#), Cosmos DB and MQTT server

• Real-time and Excel file uploads allowed (MQTT & Excel)

• Real-time data coming in through the MQTT server is plotted and thresholds are checked in real time. Visualizations and notifications are processed in real-time as the data is sent through MQTT

• LHP created a custom drag & drop dashboard to allow customers to design their dashboard layouts and share with any/all users within their organization.

Tools and Technologies

• Microsoft Azure

• MQTT

• Cosmos DB

• Angular

• .NET (C#)

Result

Provided a quick and easy solution for end users with no knowledge of analytics to be able to create charts and dashboards to visualize important KPIs.

Reduces required knowledge of analytic tools to create data insights in real-time and with historical data.

At LHP, we make master data or the general concept of measurement system analysis (MSAs) a key backbone of our strategy to unlock analytics value for our customers. Without a successful Master Data approach, cross-functional multi-disciplinary enterprise analytics or IoT solutions simply can't or don't deploy their full value. As data is more widely distributed and used for a wider array of things, to drive continued connectivity, the Analytics & IoT team helps guide and implement successful strategies, architecture, deployment, support, and organizational change management of a master data program.

Portfolio

Highlighted below are some of LHP Analytics & IoT's large scale successes implementing master data for our customers:

Large Manufacturer 1 - LHP Analytics & IoT was engaged to build and develop features and applications of our customers’ Digital Twin and IoT initiative but, through the support we provided in the design and requirements of the applications, we identified a large gap in their data management process and no single source of truth or master data system. The team immediately white boarded a master data concept and system which four weeks later was accompanied with a PO to architect and build their master data service. This was probably our favorite story to tell our prospective clients.

Large Manufacturer 2 - LHP built out a parts and options numbering assignment system as well as the design of a part pricing system using master data components as the facilitator. This included an end-to-end engagement of requirements gathering, architecture, custom build, migrations, rollout, and organizational change management of the solutions. Paired with a custom access control management process this allowed our customer to appropriately apply the right roles and responsibilities to their processes to enable approximately 80% cost reduction on their employee hours.

American Senior Communities - Building a data management and collection system for their nursing workforce to enable outward reporting analytics to their insurance providers and hospital referrers. This included the design, build, implementation, and support of the system to enable analytics.

One Software Solution

Master Data solutions can be custom developed from the ground up to meet your needs and technology stack, augmented from existing systems, or using custom software out of the box such as from vendors like Microsoft.

Microsoft MDS is a hidden jewel from Microsoft as part of their SQL Server ecosystem and in general an underutilized solution to aid companies in their analytics journey specifically tailored around master data. It enables you to manage a master set of your organization's data by organizing the data into models, creating rules for updating the data, and controlling who updates the data. With the Excel add-in, the master data set can be easily shared with other people in your organization.

Overview

A digital twin is a digital representation of an intended or actual real-world physical product, system, or process that serves as the effectively indistinguishable digital counterpart it for practical purposes, such as simulation, integration, testing, monitoring, and maintenance.

Projects

The customer has over 200,000 employees and one of the largest manufacturing footprints in the world. To reduce costs, maintain efficiencies, increase take time, improve industrial engineering changeovers, improve product development, and continue to innovate requires the latest technology and massive connection of multi-disciplinary data silos to make effective and efficient decisions.

Goal

Consult, architect, and develop the manufacturing digital twin and analytical outputs as part of their Industry 4.0 initiatives and constant innovation.

Problem

Displaced leading management consulting company for implementation of a founding member of the big three automakers in Detroit to build out their Digital Twin and Industry 4.0 manufacturing environment.

Approach

LHP delivered an initial consulting engagement to prototype Industry 4.0 technologies, architected a master asset data model, and then deployed five teams of resources to implement the modular components of the solution in conjunction with the customer’s manufacturing leadership.