For today’s producers, seamless and automated workflows are crucial for navigating obstacles like manual knowledge management and tool outages. By harnessing automated workflows and empowering predictive maintenance, manufacturers can gain instant access to actionable production data, thereby reducing inefficiencies and minimizing waste. The seamless integration of data sources and the scalability of analytics capabilities enable more informed decision-making, fostering a deeper understanding of complex operations. In today’s data-driven landscape, automated workflows have become crucial for business success, enabling data practitioners to pivot from reactive problem-solving to proactive innovation and strategy execution.
The unified orchestration instrument for knowledge, analytics, and artificial intelligence may effectively address growing demands from information groups by clearly outlining, governing, and tracking automated workflows for extract, transform, and load, analytics, and machine learning pipelines. Designed seamlessly within the Information Intelligence Platform, Workflows delivers effortless workflow definition, unparalleled visibility, and unwavering reliability. Workflows provides a diverse range of job types, including notebooks, JAR files, Python scripts, Databricks SQL queries, dashboards, Delta Lake tables pipelines, dbt tasks, and more. Workflows boasting a range of capabilities, from automation to AI-powered integrations, revolutionize the cron syntax landscape.
This blog post explores how Databricks Workflows empowered manufacturing leaders from organizations such as Corning, Volvo, and Cox Automotive to streamline their data pipelines, gain timely insights, and reduce maintenance burdens. By leveraging workflows, the teams have redirected their attention towards pioneering new ideas and innovations.
By leveraging Databricks Workflows, manufacturers can expect enhanced inventory transparency, optimized business processes, and superior customer interactions, highlighting the tangible benefits that this technology brings to the industry.
By leveraging Databricks Workflows, these organizations have successfully automated the flow of data from IoT devices on the manufacturing floor to predictive maintenance models, generating schedules and alerts with precision, and scaling analytics workloads to handle large volumes of operational data. Consequently, they experienced substantial transformations in their outputs, yielding optimised production timetables, predictive tool failure forecasting, and instant visibility into the supply chain’s status, thereby enabling proactive intervention to ensure timely product delivery. Let’s explore numerous manufacturing buyer success stories.
Corning’s seamless integration of end-to-end knowledge orchestration with Databricks Workflows fuels operational efficiency.
With Databricks Workflows, it has significantly transformed its knowledge administration processes. Corning is a pioneer in advanced materials science, leveraging expertise to fuel innovative advancements and intellectual property. Prior to this shift, Corning’s engineers employed Apache Airflow as their go-to knowledge orchestration tool; however, they have since fully transitioned to utilizing Databricks Workflows for these purposes. The deployment facilitated Corning’s ability to manage approximately 2,500 projects, processing around 5 petabytes of data, while supporting over 900 dynamic global clients. By leveraging the platform’s advanced automation features, knowledge curators were empowered to efficiently process vast amounts of information, overcome siloed structures, and develop scalable, repeatable workflows for knowledge engineers and scientists. These advancements significantly boosted operational efficiency, enabling the swift provision of crucial insights necessary for driving innovative growth.
“Databricks Workflows plays a vital role in enabling users to execute complex pipeline orchestrations at their own pace, leveraging end-to-end data flow through the Data Intelligence Platform.”
—Jibrael Hamenoo, Principal System Engineer, Information Engineering, Corning.
By leveraging Databricks Workflows, Corning enhanced real-time monitoring capabilities and streamlined pricing administration by analyzing resource utilization patterns and rapidly identifying opportunities for process optimization. Improved real-time visibility enables informed teams to anticipate and address critical issues, seamlessly recovering specific task sets without interrupting overall process continuity. As a direct result, Corning experienced a significant surge in agility, allowing it to respond promptly to market fluctuations, enhance supply chain dependability, and boost customer understanding.
Volvo’s Procurement Revamp: Real-Time Stock Insights Powered by Databricks Workflows
The organization has made significant progress in streamlining its operations by transitioning from Azure Data Factory (ADF) to Databricks Workflows. This revised version simplifies stock management for its massive global supply chain, from supplier to trucking vendor. Around 200,000 new Volvo vans are sold annually, accompanied by hundreds of thousands more already in service on streets worldwide, necessitating vast quantities of spare parts spread across warehouses globally. By leveraging real-time knowledge processing, Volvo can continuously track inventory levels and avoid potential shortages before they occur. Within the fast-paced realm of global supply-chain management, every second matters – companies rarely wish to see their expertise become quickly obsolete? This proactive and unified approach enables knowledge engineers to accurately forecast demand, ensuring optimal component availability while minimizing excess inventory.
“Workflows has proven to be an exceptional orchestrator for our organization.” Using database APIs, we can query all information to build a monitoring report that detects whether a job is failing, measures processing time, and identifies instances where it exceeds the average duration for that specific task.
Bruno Magri, Senior Information Engineer at Volvo Group Service Market Logistics.
Volvo successfully optimized its global supply chain management by seamlessly integrating Databricks Workflows with Delta Lake Tables (DLTs). The automated workflows enable Volvo’s supply chain teams to accurately forecast stock requirements, ensure optimal inventory levels, and reduce excess stock. By integrating DLT and workflows, Volvo achieved a profound impact on operational effectiveness, yielding a staggering 40% boost in handling massive data volumes, while also enabling the company to rapidly respond to customer demands, ultimately revolutionizing its logistics and significantly optimizing its overall supply chain performance.
Cox Automotive amplifies knowledge effectiveness and agility by harnessing the power of Databricks Workflows.
The company has successfully revamped its knowledge management processes by leveraging the power of Databricks Workflows, effectively streamlining large-scale knowledge handling without encountering any bottlenecks.
As a leading provider in the global automotive industry, Cox Automotive Europe is a subsidiary of Cox Automotive, the world’s largest automotive services organization committed to revolutionizing the entire lifecycle of vehicle ownership, from purchase to disposal. The Enterprise Knowledge Providers team maintains a comprehensive knowledge platform that caters primarily to internal stakeholders across various business models, while also managing multiple knowledge feeds for external third-party partners. The team gathers intelligence from multiple internal stakeholders and external frameworks.
“We rely on Databricks Workflows as the primary orchestration tool for executing approximately 300 ETL tasks, with around 120 automated processes scheduled to recur at regular intervals.”
Robert Hamlet, Lead Information Engineer at Enterprise Information Companies, Cox Automotive.
Vast amounts of data are currently processed within manufacturing pipelines, with scheduled tasks drawing from diverse sources both internally and externally to the organization. Using Databricks Workflows, Hamlet efficiently disseminates insights to both the information science team and in-house knowledge reporting specialists via seamless integrations with Tableau and Power BI. Workflows embeds real-time observability within every execution and corresponding failure notifications, empowering teams to identify issues swiftly and troubleshoot proactively, thereby minimizing the impact on data scientists.
Cox Automotive streamlined its knowledge operations with Databricks Workflows, leveraging automation to simplify extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes while providing unparalleled visibility throughout the data pipeline. This integration enables knowledge engineers to facilitate seamless knowledge sharing, rapidly identify key areas and streamline operations for maximum effectiveness. As workflows seamlessly integrate real-time knowledge feed into analytics tools, Cox can expedite data-informed decisions, optimize processes, and amplify responsiveness to market fluctuations, ultimately elevating efficiency and dexterity.
Abstract
International manufacturing leaders such as Corning, Volvo, and Cox Automotive have showcased the tangible impact of leveraging Databricks Workflows, highlighting their measurable success stories. By leveraging a seamless orchestration service tightly integrated within the Databricks Intelligence Platform, leading manufacturers not only optimized their operational efficiency but also expedited innovation to deliver instantaneously actionable insights that drive decision-making. Whether streamlining provides chains, ensuring inventory readiness, or automating workflows at scale, Databricks Workflows enables organisations to become more agile, environmentally sustainable, and data-driven.
Getting began with Databricks Workflows
Databricks Workflows provides a straightforward, reliable orchestration solution for data and AI on the Data Intelligence Platform. By leveraging Workflows, you can establish a cohesive workflow orchestration framework for implementing ETL pipelines, machine learning training workflows, and more. Workflows provide advanced process management capabilities, enabling seamless integration of various job types and triggering options.
