Samsung SDS Co., a systems integration firm under South Korea’s Samsung Group, wants to give its smart factory platform a big push by expanding its accessibility and applications.

The Korean company said at a press conference on Tuesday it plans to take Nexplant, its artificial intelligence-based platform, beyond Samsung affiliates and expand its business scope to cover not only production but design, construction and operation of the entire plant.

The Nexplant platform uses Brightics AI, Samsung SDS’ big data analytics platform, to process large amounts of data gathered from smart sensors deployed throughout the factory.

The company said its solution helps factories instantly detect system errors and predict possible failures, thereby optimizing the manufacturing process and boosting operational efficiency by 30 percent. The platform is also based on an AI-enhanced prediction model that uses machine learning to study the different types of defects, improving the accuracy of categorizing failure patterns by 32 percent.

Samsung SDS offers the Nexplant platform in four key manufacturing sectors - facilities, process, inspection and equipment logistics.

An average manufacturing factory generates dozens of terabytes of data a day. The need to analyze this vast amount of data has led to a surge in demand for intelligent factory solutions, which incorporate AI, internet of things, big data analytics and other new technologies to create a smarter, more connected factory.

The global smart factory market is projected to grow from $120 billion in 2015 to $170 billion by 2020. The local market is currently worth around 5 trillion won ($4.51 billion).

“Samsung SDS has more than 2,000 solution engineers and a client base of over 300 companies in various IT manufacturing sectors,” said Lee Jae-cheol, senior managing director in charge of the smart factory business. “We plan to leverage our 30-year-old knowhow to lead the digital transformation of the global manufacturing industry.”

By Lim Sung-hyun and Kim Hyo-jin

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