Empowering Hitachi Rail’s Digital Factory with Private 5G Networks for Enhanced Safety and Innovation

GlobalLogic and Ericsson are supporting Hitachi Rail to enhance quality and operational reliability through secure, high-performance private 5G connectivity at its new digital railcar factory for the North American market. Built by Hitachi Rail with expertise from Hitachi Digital’s GlobalLogic and Hitachi Digital Services teams, the evolution of the Digital Factory showcases the art of what’s possible with a true ‘One Hitachi’ initiative.

Challenges

Hitachi Rail’s new 307,000 sq. ft. Digital Factory in Hagerstown, MD, isn’t just a railcar plant — it’s the most digitally advanced facility among 230 of Hitachi factories worldwide. Built to deliver up to 20 state-of-the-art railcars per month for North America, the plant is engineered to run on precision, speed, enabled by uninterrupted digital performance.

From real-time digital twins that mirror the factory floor to advanced supply chain, smart manufacturing, and quality inspection platforms — the entire system promotes worker safety and wellbeing, enhances product quality and ensures reliable production. To sustain this high-performance environment, the factory needs a private wireless backbone capable of guaranteed bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and advanced quality of service to ensure mission-critical applications running flawlessly.

GlobalLogic, a Hitachi Group Company, answered the call by combining deep telecom and smart manufacturing expertise with trusted partnerships across the network ecosystem. Our end-to-end digital capabilities — from silicon to cloud — delivered the connectivity foundation for Hitachi Rail’s next-generation manufacturing facility.

Value Created

As a trusted Ericsson Private 5G ecosystem partner, GlobalLogic supported Hitachi Rail in building the factory’s digital foundation and connectivity strategy. We designed and deployed a state-of-the-art private 5G network for manufacturing, developed tailored use cases to meet operational requirements, and continue to provide lifecycle management to ensure the network performs at its best.

GlobalLogic provided technical and business consulting, managed the complete deployment and integration of the private 5G network into the plant’s operations, and oversaw end-to-end network lifecycle management and service delivery.

This collaboration is underscored by the strengths of Ericsson Private 5G, a next-generation private network solution that delivers secure and reliable 4G and 5G connectivity using its single-server dual-mode core. Purpose-built for business-critical environments, Ericsson Private 5G arrives pre-integrated for rapid time to service, empowering enterprises with advanced, intelligent operations while ensuring sensitive data remains protected on site.

Beyond connectivity, GlobalLogic engineered one of the factory’s core digital enablers — a unified communication layer. This component enables scalable innovation and operational agility through:

• Streamlining integration with third-party systems 
• Orchestrating the deployment of new capabilities and the expansion of existing ones
• Ensuring seamless operation of digital factory elements, including those powered by the 5G private network

Impact

Our deployment of a 5G private network for manufacturing serves as a high-performing infrastructure, supporting current use cases while also enabling the future evolution and scaling of the digital factory’s infrastructure. 

A robotic dog conducts real-time, automatic visual quality inspections in the factory, ensuring high product quality standards and driving operational excellence. This solution is powered by 5G’s high bandwidth and low latency capabilities.

The 5G private network brings physical AI to life by enabling real-time data capture, analysis, and responses across production lines and inspections systems.