Rehrig Pacific Co. Is probably not what most people picture when they think of a company that develops software.
A fourth-generation family business founded in 1913, the company got its start manufacturing reusable wood crates for the dairy industry. It expanded to plastic crates in the 1960s and then built out its repertoire as it produced more varied plastic containers, including garbage bins and boxes for Coca-Cola beverages.
But as vice president of information technology Brian Rowe explains, Rehrig Pacific is an example of how brick-and-mortar manufacturers are finding ways to take their digital transformation to the next level by leveraging the power of the cloud.
Since the early aughts, the container manufacturer had a system where it placed RFID, or radio-frequency identification, tags on its containers, which not only helped Rehrig Pacific track its shipments but also helped customers track theirs—since many used those same containers to transport their own goods.
When it began the project, Rehrig Pacific was hosting all of that data with its own servers located on premises. That meant that one power outage near its servers could take down its entire system. And the company’s systems weren’t connected to each other. In other words, its data on which containers were where wasn’t integrated with, say, its data on customers.
So Rowe and his colleagues helped Rehrig Pacific migrate its existing servers to AWS, and now they’re reaping the rewards. “We have multiple customers who, as their product is going out the door on freight, on a truck—they’re actually getting awareness through an AWS service pipeline that tells them, ‘Hey, we just shipped a truckload of X, and here’s all of the assets that are on that truck,’” he said.
Cloud manufacturing
Rehrig Pacific’s experience is part of a broader trend, as manufacturers have found that the cloud can provide real value to not just buzzy tech startups but also to factories and other industrial players.
Shortly after cloud computing initially came on the scene roughly two decades ago, researchersproposed that by tapping into the cloud, manufacturers could more easily collect real-time data from the factory floor or centralize information formerly spread across a host of computers into one data source. Companies saw the sea change and responded.
In 2019, for example, Volkswagenconnected 124 of its factories to AWS’s infrastructure and ran data from the shop floor into AI and machine learning algorithms. And that same year, Titan, a wheel manufacturer based in Illinois, employedOracle to help better collect factory data in the cloud and predict machine breakdowns.
Still, manufacturers haven’t fully tweaked their businesses’ infrastructure to take advantage of cloud technology, according to a survey commissioned by AWS and the tech titan IBM. From June to July 2023, the two companies polled more than 1,100 manufacturers in 21 countries and found that almost half said they could better use the cloud to add value.
Rehrig Pacific is one of those manufacturers that are trying to—and succeeding in—using the cloud to add value to its business, says Rowe.
Because Rehrig Pacific is already firmly in the cloud, it recently started to make use of AWS’s existing software toolkit to see how it can leverage generative AI. For example, over its century-long history, the plastic container manufacturer has produced more than 14,000 pages of technical reference material for its engineers working on the factory floor. Now, if those engineers need to understand the company’s machines, they don’t need to flip through three-ring binders. They can just ask AI.
“They’re on the floor with an app on their phone asking a chatbot a question,” Rowe said.