Thanks to reflek.io’s digital twin SaaS platform and services built with Akka, Renault Group has entered the industrial metaverse, gaining a real-time digital replica of its distributed factories and extended supply chain. By populating the simulated ecosystem with production data, the company can close the information and execution gaps that currently exist between its legacy applications.
“Essentially, what we’re doing with our SaaS platform at Renault Group is breaking down the silos between infrastructure, execution and analytics,” says Jean-Philippe Le Roux. “We recreate a layer of digital continuity starting from the legacy systems, enabling Renault Group to provide valuable use cases while decommissioning the shopfloor’s critical systems step by step. We model processes and assets in natural language so that they can work together seamlessly. This drastically simplifies the application landscape.”
Digital twins enable Renault Group to reinvent and rebuild its business logic. reflek.io provides a next-generation development framework that combines serverless, no OPS and generative AI, making development costs marginal. By abstracting the physical complexity of factories, reflek.io makes it easy to identify bottlenecks, recombine processes, optimize operations, and then share knowledge seamlessly with colleagues around the world.
“We see this as creating a new type of manufacturing, which we call reactive lean,” says Jean-Philippe Le Roux. “By giving complete information to people on the factory floor, we empower them to continuously improve. At the same time, Renault Group can instantly see the accurate status of everything in all factories. For companies with complex, distributed manufacturing operations, legacy equipment, and code that is hard to change, reflek.io running on Akka provides a way to transform rapidly and non-disruptively.”
The solution also helps Renault Group ensure compliance with manufacturing best practices and sustainability regulations, because all real-world activities are reliably recorded and stored in the digital twins. “It’s easy to enrich the digital twins with information such as the cost or the carbon footprint of each operation,” says Jean-Philippe Le Roux. “You can then roll up the information to see the picture for the entire factory. This kind of granular information is extremely hard to access today, yet it is essential if companies are to achieve continuous improvement.”
For Renault Group, a key benefit of reflek.io is that it enables a steady, low-risk, low-cost migration from existing systems and processes. The solution provided immediate value while enabling Renault Group to keep iterating toward its vision of the future. On the financial side, accurate real-time views of the consumption of vehicle parts will potentially translate into millions in annual savings by enabling the company to hold reduced inventory.
The digital twins built on Akka make it easier for Renault Group to assess manufacturing operations and make optimal decisions in a timely manner that reduce costs and increase quality. With real-time monitoring and traceability of key parameters, Renault Group can also plan better and adapt faster to disruptions in the broader supply chain.
Jean-Philippe Le Roux concludes: “Working with Akka continues to be a great experience - their technical expertise is extremely high, which gives us confidence to serve high-level customers like Renault Group. What’s more, Akka’s technology works perfectly, allowing reflek.io to focus on the high-level business of helping our customers innovate to improve efficiency and accelerate manufacturing.”
