The Industrial IoT is Bringing Smart Manufacturing to Life

By Sujeet Chand, SVP & CTO, Rockwell Automation

Sujeet Chand, SVP & CTO, Rockwell Automation

Smart manufacturing is proving to be nothing short of a new industrial revolution. Companies around the world are using it to digitally transform their operations and to drive productivity improvements in virtually every process, worker and machine in their organizations.

So it should come as no surprise that countries have created smart manufacturing initiatives to help usher industries into this new era. In Europe, manufacturers are transforming their operations and business models to align with Industry 4.0. In the Asia-Pacific, top initiatives include China Manufacturing 2025 and Make in India.

Industrial IoT technologies present an opportunity to accelerate the realization of benefits from these initiatives. While the technologies alone are not an end solution, they can help companies improve time-to-market, lower total cost of production, improve asset utilization and reduce enterprise risk when they’re deployed as part of a larger smart manufacturing strategy.

Enabling Technologies

Industrial IoT technologies allow companies to optimize operations and derive new business value from leveraging data and information across their enterprise.

For this to happen, manufacturers must first converge their plant-level operations technologies (OT) and enterprise-level information technologies (IT), which have long been separate from each other, into a unified architecture. The deployment of common, secure, standard and unmodified Ethernet as the communications network for real-time control and communications is often the first step to converging OT and IT.

With a unified secure network infrastructure in place, companies can deploy the latest industrial IoT technologies across their enterprise. Key components of this deployment include:

Scalable computing: There’s a common misconception that all computing in smart manufacturing operations will be done in the cloud. In fact, computing takes place at all levels of the enterprise to help prevent data overload and solve the different analytics problems that exist at various levels. Edge computing, for example, can be used to analyze data at the device and machine level and support timely decision-making close to the production process where every millisecond counts. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is ideal for tracking maintenance trends, optimizing assets across locations, and remote monitoring of operations.

While The Technologies Alone Are Not An End Solution, They Can Help Companies Improve Time-To-Market, Lower Total Cost Of Production, Improve Asset Utilization And Reduce Enterprise Risk

Information and analytics: Used in conjunction with scalable computing, a scalable analytics approach will convert raw data into actionable information at different levels of the enterprise to help make better and timely decisions. Plant-floor workers can use local real-time analytics to take immediate actions for improving the uptime of devices and machines. At the same time, management can use plant-performance analytics to compare site-to-site performance and track compliance.

Visualization and mobility: Operators and maintenance technicians must be able to quickly access and act on the information anytime and anywhere, without being overwhelmed by it. Manufacturers need visualization software that can deliver critical information to mobile and desktop devices in an intuitive, easy-to-understand manner, such as with graphics-based displays. They also increasingly need emerging visualization technologies such as augmented reality to deliver and quickly act on information. Today, mobility is a must-have to make sure workers can access information regardless of where they are.

Secure networking: Defense-in-depth security is considered a security best practice. It assumes that any one point of protection can and likely will be defeated, and uses layers of security through a combination of physical, electronic and procedural security measures.

Manufacturers and industrial operators needing help with security can use industry reference architectures and frameworks. These documents are freely available, such as through the Cisco and Rockwell Automation Converged Plantwide Ethernet (CPwE) program, and provide helpful guidance for managing network-access security and addressing unknown risks.

Smart Manufacturing in Action

The power of smart manufacturing comes to life when industrial IoT technologies work in concert toward specific business goals.

Imagine a hypothetical plant where a controller uses real-time analytics to detect that a pump is nearing failure. As soon as it discovers those leading indicators, the controller can take immediate action to change the speed of the pump to help prevent failure. It also can share the data to the cloud to compensate or optimize production as needed elsewhere in the plant. These actions, occurring in the blink of an eye, can help improve asset utilization, help prevent downtime and optimize energy usage.

Chinese pharmaceutical maker Zhejiang Medicine Co. (ZMC) provides a real-world example of industrial IoT benefits. To help its new facility go paperless, the company implemented a manufacturing execution system (MES) with electronic-batch-recording capabilities. The fully integrated MES pulls orders from ERP business systems, identifies the materials that need to be retrieved, and guides workers through the production process. It also captures key information during production and uses real-time alarming and exception handling to alert workers of issues.

The MES software helped ZMC achieve its goal of a 100 percent paperless facility. That, in turn, helped the company reduce its labor costs by 5 to 10 percent by eliminating manual data recording. The company also estimates the MES will help reduce batch-record review times by 46 to 75 percent, and management-review cycle times by 50 percent.

A New Era Underway

As ZMC and many other companies prove, the smart manufacturing era has not only arrived, it’s well underway. Manufacturers and industrial operators that hesitate to embrace this new era risk putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage against those that do.