Manufacturing Industry Leads Cloud Adoption

It was good to see a blog by Gary Mintchell revealing that the industry sector is leading the adoption of Cloud, yet so often I hear the words that “it will not happen in our company or industry for years!”.

Gary writes a great set of blogs always worth having a link to it.

http://t.co/LIPLIc6SgV

Some Quotes from this blog:

“global study that indicates cloud is moving into a second wave of adoption, with companies no longer focusing just on efficiency and reduced costs, but rather looking to cloud as a platform to fuel innovation, growth and disruption.

The study finds that 53 percent of companies expect cloud to drive increased revenue over the next two years. Unfortunately, this will be challenging for many companies as only 1 percent of organizations have optimized cloud strategies in place while 32 percent have no cloud strategy at all.”

So often I have sales and people saying that cloud is driven by a change in cost model, but also in all my interviews with customers and strategic thinkers it has been a platform for addressing the “changing speed of change and flexibility needed today” that is driving it. The world is changing faster and faster, and the ability to deliver the RIGHTS:

• Right Product
• Right Price
• Right Cost
• Right Time
• Right Location

Is key and this means rolling increased new numbers of products across a distribution of value assets (plants) that will produce smaller lots (production runs), at less cost.

Understanding NOW what the state of Inventory, Work in Progress, and equipment to get to market is key.

Also we seeing the “walls of a plant” expand, beyond the manufacturing plant to now treat the whole manufacturing, and distribution supply chain as part of manufacturing. So the traditional MES (manufacturing Execution System ) is expanding, to offer the ability model the plant to store as operations, where product must be tracked to compliance, and work items distributed to workers and assets in that distribution chain.

“In the study IDC identifies five levels of cloud maturity: ad hoc, opportunistic, repeatable, managed and optimized. The study found that organizations elevating cloud maturity from the ad hoc, the lowest level to optimized, the highest, results dramatic business benefits, including:

•        revenue growth of 10.4 percent
•         reduction of IT costs by 77 percent
•         shrinking time to provision IT services and applications by 99 percent
•         boosting IT department’s ability to meet SLAs by 72 percent
•         doubling IT department’s ability to invest in new projects to drive innovation.”

Cloud Adoption by Industry

By industry, manufacturing has the largest percentage of companies in one of the top three adoption categories at 33 percent, followed by IT (30 percent), finance (29 percent), and healthcare (28 percent). The lowest adoption levels by industry were found to be government/education and professional services (at 22 percent each) and retail/wholesale (at 20 percent). By industry, professional services, technology, and transportation, communications, and utilities expected the greatest impact on key performance indicators (KPIs) across the board.”

The above learnings and results do not surprise me, based upon my own engagements in the field, and observing the increased realization that speed of change is important, and tradition large projects are going out the door. Replaced by rapid projects leveraging existing expertise in the industry and adding through own operational process value to differentiate.  

Momentum grows on Internet of Things in Industrial and Manufacturing Environment

As I enter another week of brainstorming workshops across Schneider Software, with thought leaders, we are working through innovations on technology, architecture and process. Centered around the “cloud” and “Internet of things” while we have offerings happening in both areas, we need shift from offerings to these technologies be a natural part of the industrial architecture and process of buying and applying an industrial solution. I also spoke with many people over the last 2 weeks across the world not about technology but about the solution challengers and it was clear that the three main challengers kept coming up:

•  People and operational change of moving to teams which involved remote workers and virtual experts
•  Agility to change production, and process quickly and efficiently
•  Holistic control across the manufacturing industrial assets. This required the expansion to   assets that could be mobile or remote to traditional industrial plant, yet still are apart of Value Chain that they are accountable.

Accountability came up over and over again; this means different things from a safety of people to food safety so trace ability etc to efficiency and responsibility to the environment and impact. It was clear in all the discussions that a change in thinking of architecture and approach was needed but instead of its being a “dream” it is really possible today in a sustainable way using such technologies as Cloud and Internet of Things. The architecture below is an example of distributed, but needing a unified operational experience across roles across devices, and unifying devices.

Also during the week I came across two articles one from Microsoft and another from ARC on Hanover fair both supporting the increased momentum in the market for Internet of Things.

Key as MS  points out below the opportunity to investigate and improve your business by naturally looking beyond the traditional architectures, overcoming the concerns such as security, by implementing secure architectures and approaches “that does not mean isolation”.   

The Operational Transformation is here from a design point of view, again this is one of the technologies and approaches to be employed to achieve the operational workspace and efficiency required in the flat world.

Happy New Year, A year of Promise for Operational Transformation

As I sit and look out over the surf in south Australia, with the end of year here, we have time to reflect.
Firstly happy new year to all of you.
2014 has a real opportunity to be a transformation year in the Operational Management space, with many of the seedlings of trends and direction becoming increasingly adopted as we accelerate into new requirement of agility.
In this brief blog the areas for watching:

• The increased use of the "internet" as a natural part of the operational / automation architecture
• The increased adoption of the cloud combined with the expect rapid expansion "managed industrial services" (offerings) available from vendors and specialist suppliers
• The increased transition from central to distributed, in all aspects of architecture and operational approach to plants.
• The increased role of energy and environment as one of the big factors in operational/ automation design.
• The change in operational Experience to accommodate the transition of workforce to Gen Y and to a more operational team
• The shift to the "internet of things" where smart strategies will increase the distributed landscape of operations, and control.

So many of these strategies are well under way, but 2014 there is the potential for surge in adoption to increase  as confidence and acceptance of the approaches takes place.

Enjoy the start of 2014.

Review of the Blog “A Look at Industrial Operational Management Environment in 2020!!”

Throughout 2013, this blog and the message it brings has generated a lot of discussions and thought, debate when it comes to technology, architectural and cultural decisions being made around industrial solutions. The traditional approach we have taken for the last 20 years in design even evolutionary design of solutions must change, as there are too many vectors arriving at single point in time around:

·         Culture

·         Operational Agility to enable survival

·         Digital native workers

·         Safety and environmental impact

·         Combined with operational practices transformation

·         Technology like the “Cloud” and “Internet of things” extending the scope of the traditional industrial solutions to a wider value chain

I have been asked a number of times what were the big changes in 2013, basically they are listed above. Really when you look at these in the context of “the industrial landscape in 2020”, the transformation and decisions in architectures are key. As stated last week the “internet” will be part of the backbone of the industrial solutions; we will have “on premise “ and “off premise” components of this solution, and the shift to “activities” that transverse devices, roles, and locations are a key turn in the design approach.

So as you wind down on the year and wind up for Xmas I thought it was a good thing to reflect on what I started with this year, the projected landscape in 2020 and the only change is that, in some parts of the world such as China, South Africa many of the characteristics apply today.

Lets face it 2020 is only 8 years away, look at 8 years ago: Facebook had barely launched; iPhone and iPad did not exist, the A380 Airbus had not flown, and there was no YouTube, Twitter had not taken. Yet today Facebook, Youtube and social media are a natural part of our culture and lifestyle. I phone has now past MS Outlook as the world's largest email client, and mobile devices outsell all PC sales, which shows the significant shift in everyday life to always connected with the mobile device, not just for calls, but a text, news, email. Imagine doing business today without a mobile being able to access the required information. So in 2020, what will be a natural part of the Industrial Operational Management/ Plant Operations “day in the life”.

Are we designing today's systems for the future, are we looking at work ethic of 5 to 8 years out when designing? The answer is probably not farther than 2 to 3 years this could be a mistake when all the factors are changing so much.

Over the holiday period in my reading,  I ran into an article “How we’ll do Business in 2012” by futurist Morris Miselowski, which provoked reflection on much of what this blog covered last year, and thoughts about reality at that point in time. During my last trip to UK, I visited a client whom I thought is coming to grip with their automation/ operation system design and planning, but looking into the period 2015 to 20, and defining the roles but most of all the “day in the life” of those roles in 2018/20. This is the correct way to go as it allows the thought and design pattern to shift to the new paradigm we will be facing in 2020.

So let’s set some facts down about the state of the world in 2020 from Mike Miselowski’s article:

• The 32^nd Olympic Games will be held.
• It will be a leap year.
• Baby Boomers will be older than 60
• One in five of us will be over 60 years of age.
• One in three employees will be working casual, part-time or project base vs career in a company.
• 40% of today’s senior leaders will have reached retirement age.
• Gen Y will account for 42% of the workforce.
• The average tenure in a jib / role will be 2.4 years
• One in four workers will be working remotely and virtually.

The last 5 points echo a lot of what we are starting to see in the market, especially in certain parts of the world e.g.| China and South Africa have both lost the Baby Boomer and the first half of Gen X generations. Gen Y is already a significant portion in their workforce, bringing with them real-time/ transient approaches to tasks with limited experience, they require solutions to absorb this work ethic vs challenge it. By 2020, we will all be in this mode, and it is the thought / and industry leaders who “embrace” this transitional work ethic so they can execute and grow the business by harnessing it that will be a leapfrogging the market.

Mike Miselowski made a comment on tomorrow’s workplace in business, but it applies to the operational space as well:

“The 2020 workplace will need to be adept at uniting a physically – present tribe of employees with a tribe of offsite, and often transient, staff. The latter will be specifically chosen for their ability to add value to the task or project, regardless of where they are on the globe.”

This concept aligns with the thoughts we have discussed in this blog around the transition from Applications – to – Roles – to – Activities, in the operational life. Many businesses are going away from offices to activity based workplaces where you choose you workplace (desk), location for the day based on the most efficient place to execute activities at hand. Compare this with the traditional office with family photos, and all your files. Now the workspace is clear with a power supply, internet connection (probably wireless) and all your files and information will be in the “cloud” or only local working space on your local device. Traditional automation solutions run a process with a specific layout for a PC or workstation which does not align with “activity” thinking, agility in users/ roles, the industrial operational work experience of tomorrow must allow activities to be chosen and the materials, information and procedures to execute all available no matter my location or device.

Tomorrow the “cloud” will be a natural part of the operational, automation world especially relative to information sharing, knowledge management, operational procedures consistently, and KPI consistently. The architectural landscape will be an “Industrial Enterprise landscape” across the value chain of the product, spanning plants, countries, cultures, automation systems, and vendors and companies. Yes,  the “federated” operational system delivering the product / service required to be “end to end” to the customer, with real-time awareness, and agility across the value chain, and this will span companies. The only way to compete is based upon service, requiring  responsiveness and agility.   

The average tenure will be 2.4 years, and if you consider 6 months to a year in today's terms is used in bringing a new person into the role to 100 % productivity. The approach to “time to performance” of new personal will need to change dramatically, and learning will natural, on the job, and self/ online training. Manuals will only be references, the learning and understanding will be You Tubes for short, focused skill absorption. The attitude of “why not”, and “what if” will prevail, and the system must explain or limit the “why not” and enable the “what if” question to be answered.

Systems will constantly evolving and changing, as changes in the “value chain of a product or service” evolve with different players, plants, supplies the ability to “plug and play” a new member of the value chain into flowing system will be key.

All the best for Xmas and New Year, and as you reflect on the year ahead I hope some of the comments above are forming some of the foundation for the themes for 2014, it will be a very exciting year, as the reality in the transformation of the industrial landscape takes shape initially from vendor offerings (Example this time last year the historians were “on premise” now two leading vendors have solutions for Tier2 (enterprise Historians) in the cloud) Invensys been one.

Applying New Technologies “Cloud/ Internet of Things” to Achieve addition “Jobs to be Done” vs Initially Applying to Existing Systems

Last week I was in Perth speaking with many people, and again it struck me that people were not looking a new opportunities for such technologies as the “cloud, or Internet of things” they were still in the traditional mindset.

As I have mentioned before I am a big believer in “The Outcome Driven Innovation” approach to looking at markets, opportunities. Providing a clear view into trends and focus on what is important.

So why are not people looking at the opportunities beyond the traditional industrial space of automation systems, to extend the scope and alignment of complete value chain. Example was with Invensys’s recent release of a “cloud based historian” the initial people you talk to are struggling on the benefit vs just a “tier 2 / Enterprise historian”. This is not surprising when “the conversation continued”, they were applying the technology to solve an existing “Job” problem which was well satisfied vs reviewing opportunities to add value that just are not served today.

But when I asked the question about their 1000’s of small auxiliary plants with low manning (if any),  for water, substations etc, and the opportunity to have 10 to 100 points coming up into a “managed  historian like service” so no need to: host, setup, manage a historian, and no need buy an over sized historian as now the small points from one plant can be included in a historian capability used by others (multi tenant). On the realization that we could actually extend the reach of the existing system, and therefore the opportunity optimize and tune these less visible plants, providing transparency and potentially interaction, people “sparked” up, and now the “Cloud” had some real additional value.

The same discussion happened over dinner with the “Internet of things” where again people were thinking of applying within the existing plants, vs extending the scope of control, visibility to a less well served segment of the value chain. Really the initial opportunity is to extend the unified system, and to remote devices and empower the roaming staff. Example is the “cold supply chain” in the distribution of food, where leaving the plant you have a series of refrigerated trucks and distribution centers. In order to achieve positive release of product and end to end full history the products. The “internet of things” provides the opportunity of each of the devices, plants (trucks) can be connected the temperatures of the products recorded as well as what products are in the truck. In a geographically distributed solutions, the concepts of isolated, remote assets, roaming value assets such as wells, trucks, and roaming people the logical is to have them all connected, the ability todo analysis and notification, react faster etc. Extending the traditional landscape/ scope of the automation system, with the technology step very minor if you have a 3G/ 4G approach and a tiered /Hybrid architecture. The hybrid architecture provides data integrity, with store forward etc,  addressing possible disconnects, but with the bandwidth management now available on data systems is key. This is only one example the if we look at other roaming equipment such as mine trucks and trains, wells and roaming drill rigs etc. Why now is because the technology, infrastructure and requirement exist, combining these provides a new level operational value. The move to supporting EDGE/ GPRS interfaces will become a natural part of industrial solutions, with self discovery capability.

Another discussion last week that stands out in my mind was around a customer who considered the cloud as unsafe from a security point of view. Then someone decided to really test this unsafe assumption and had an internal review of their security exposure vs the cloud solution, and it became very clear that their own “on premise” architecture was significantly more exposed than the cloud solution. This study was a good example of the ignorance of the new architectures; this customer is now shifting their architectural landscape to a hybrid architecture including “on and off” premise components.

It is clear that “Internet” will be part of the backbone of industrial automation and operations solutions. Especially as the market drives for more accountability End to End and decisions in the NOW, no matter where the key decision person is independent of device.

It is a matter of "when" not “if" for the cloud in Industry!

At the Invensys North American user conference, last week the discussion and chatter around cloud was in full swing. Many people on a discovery phase, realising that it was not "if” it was more " when"!

Even in the large companies while the issue of security and IP protection was significant and a hot topic for discussion, there was a general feeling this will be resolved and proven in the next couple of years, opening up the opportunity for companies to considerate possibilities.

It was clear that many companies are a different maturity, thought pattern relative to cloud.

In many of my Operational Transformation sessions, the discussion and realization that the business operational requirements of the next decade are most effectively satisfied by the cloud architecture no matter if it is "private" or public. Key was the discussion around even design current solution architectures in a way that will easily expand to the cloud when the security concerns are satisfied.

 Interestingly some of the leading companies realized the significant initial opportunity is the delivery of operational/ industrial services such as historian, MES, operational work procedures with domain solutions built on top to small and remote sites. These sites have limited engineering, and it local support and this has been the barrier for adoption of many of the traditional tools applied in the larger plants. In a simple way the ability to have multiple end sites historized their information (it maybe on a few tags or items) have calculations performed on them and but without having to install, setup or maintain a historian or information set of clients. Small numbers of tags and limited knowledge has restricted use of such tools. This can all change now, with the cloud infrastructure that can expand, and access sites in a secure way even if it a one “diode” out of the plants, the information can now be stored, structured and then a set of safe tools provided for access. So in locations like India, China, south East Asia and small sites in USA the opportunity for using these tools limited to larger sites with support capability is key.

My thoughts swing back to my trip earlier in the year to New Zealand where an engineer from Water waste water industry just stated ”why would you put another server on  remote sites, the hassle of sustaining them in harsh environments, patch managing, and just keeping fan going when there is not local service is too much”. Last week this underlying message kept ringing through from all sized companies, as a real opportunity for reduction in sustaining costs, and increasing the reliability and increased value to these remote small sites.

What I wanted to point out throughout this year the momentum “wave” and discussion around the possibilities with using cloud has increased dramatically. As companies like Invensys focus on understanding the customer’s barriers to adoption and work on the IP and Security concerns to enable a “trusted system”, the adoption will increase. All Enterprise Architects in Industrial space need consider, especially the smaller remote sites that as a central engineering and IT organization there is cost and trouble is servicing effectively.  

The Change Landscape of business Intelligence, EMI and Analytics driven by Information Driven Companies

All through this week in Europe I have spoken with customers looking for decisions in the NOW, and more people empowered to make these decisions. This does mean the traditional worker is evolving to knowledge worker, and this is across the different roles in the operational plant. But following on from last week’s blog the drive for realtime decisions is driving up the requirement for more advanced analytics to enable that decision, especially as the experience and time in the role of the decision maker reducers.

This drive for information and decisions, is causing significant other transformations in intelligence segment, and these are captured in a recent ARC table:

Some of the fundamental concepts it points out:

• The shift in time focus from Past to Future: in the industrial world I would put that as truly an expansion from the past and current to now past, current and future.
• From a performance to a predictive view that enables that decision
• Move from Batch data to realtime, this is key as we move from reports to dashboards that are dynamic with small trend tails showing now and immediate past easy to understand from a glance.
• Move from IT intensive creation to Self service: this is even more apparent in the industrial space as operations want to be self empowered without the complexity and delay in engaging either engineering or IT.
• Users move from a few Gurus to a collective team of people what I referred to as the flexible operational team (many blogs on this) where experience is shared to achieve realtime decisions. Virtual experts in an active community either from within a company across sites, and subcontractors/ suppliers can now be in the realtime decision with the on plant person.
• Deployment will shift from “on Premise” to a “Managed set of on demand services” this while only just starting in the industrial space makes logical and even more sense in the industrial space. Because the information and these virtual communities will live outside of plants and across the world. Companies are talking of Asset Facebook concepts to where a community of peers and experts across plants working on similar equipment and processes can interact share and make informed decisions together. The concept of a hosted set of services for an Information environment will be foundational for this to work.
• Another comment is the automated actions, I see this more in the industrial space as the shift from just supplying information to having embedded operational procedures to guide users through consistent actions.

Yes,  the traditional EMI (Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence) system will transform dramatically, and it will need to work well with the I tools which are also transforming, as well as provide “preconfigured experiences” to enable users to answer known decisions and enable “self Service” for rapid adoption.   

 

“Managed Services” in the Cloud provides an acceleration Opportunity for Small Industrial/ Manufacturing Business

Last two weeks again a significant amount of my time has been in discussions and strategy around the “hosted managed services” and the real opportunity vs speculation. The discussion continues to grow more people participating with a clear outcome of the discussion on the significant new opportunity these managed services deliver to Small Business, Small sites.   The discussion is happening in larger companies, they are accessing how to use the services, and off premise capability.

Early adoption of managed services will be the small business that do not have limited IT resources, who are also having to grapple with the changing consumer of the market, who need access to industrial information traditionally only for the control rooms, or customized databases.

The Small Business companies are just jumping on the new opportunities the cloud based managed services offer, bringing significant new capabilities quickly to their business that would traditionally be out of their reach due to cost and expertise. Initially in the back office applications such as CRM, ERP and MS Office capability, providing an experience of what advantage, and understanding of the security risk vs. Reward. Now they looking at the new services coming on line for the operational execution management increasing real-time control of inventory, and production order tracking and execution.

Adopting  “Managed Services” built in experience of product and domain experts, with many practices and capabilities, but they do not require a tender/ RFP, they are ready, yes there is a compromise in some customization, but that sacrifice is low compared to advantage to adopting the capability in its predefined format. Providing a platform for faster decisions and agility to serve the markets, expand with small loosely coupled faculties that can capture new market by reacting faster to market changes. The discussion of smaller facilities strategically situated for markets, but this network of value assets (sites) now can execute in an aligned manner, through a common set of “operational managed Services” hosted in the cloud.

A clear understanding of inventory across the sites, the status of orders, the status of the plant, from one central operational system, interacting from each site. For many of these small sites the operational execution is a highly manual (forms) driven process, so the ability to have a set of handheld devices, and desktop devices connected to the cloud enabling proven operational process execution is not a substantial step.

The value in return is significant, delivering them and efficiency in operational execution consistency, control and awareness only previously achievable with significant project investment, and expertise. We will see an explosion in the amount of these “Managed Services” for the industrial / manufacturing sector come to market, key will be how well developed and architected the services are. They have a 90% reproducibility across sites, to provide the speed to up and running. Early adopters needs make sure they confirm:

·         That the solution is built on standard, proven industrial products.

·         That the solution is tested and is 90% reusable across sites so the domain is managed as a product not an application, so will scale, and evolve across 100s of customers.

Disruptive opportunity with transitional actives (FAT, training, simulation) for industrial space

As the weeks go on the discussion continues to increase around the opportunities, and growing consideration of Cloud playing in the industrial automation and operations architectures within end users. One of the emerging realization of opportunities in the transitional activities on bringing a plant on line, such as commissioning and operational learning. Not been mission critical activities, as one person put it “why would you want buy and set up hardware for activities such as FAT (factory acceptance testing) or training simulation for only 2 to 3 months?”

The concept of a virtual FAT environment is not new, what is intriguing is the fact that the “cloud” offers expandable (elastic) computing engaged for a temporary period on a monthly plan. Too often the limitation on FAT efficiency is availability of hardware, due to project budgets of purchasing hardware , no flexibility to expand and then the hardware goes to site, restricting the offsite testing and the ability to have multiple FATs happening at the same time. The cloud can easily host the virtual images of servers, control simulators and different workstations of a plant.

Key is that an engineering house can provision the required computing capability in days and test out the loading required computing power required by the application via a cloud virtual environment. They can create a temporary FAT or development environment in the cloud, which can exist for the life of project build, costing is leasing, the system can expand as the project grows or goes through different stages. This is different to a virtual environment in that the computing power in unlimited, and it grows and shrinks with the requirement and it avoids out of date hardware with no home.

Another end user discussion is relative to training simulation. Traditional OTS (Operating Training Systems) programs expect a long term steady state of training capability, but as the initial project go live, and the evolution of existing staff, and associated staff they have a temporary requirement for significant operational and worker training systems, and again " cloud seems ideal for this". The fact that a simulation OTS can be set up and then expanded, accessed from different locations, and then dismantled after the demand drops without the need to by unnecessary hardware is key.

Both of these examples are not earth shattering, but the discussion and questions show a shift in thinking. I am fully of the belief that a typical automation/ operations architecture which spans geographical boundaries and even within a plant, will be a HYBRID architecture in the next 3 to 5 years. With on premise set of applications, (probably upgraded versions of the existing ones on the site today), and with a set “cloud” based applications either on private or pub that work in a complementary fashion with the plants. Providing additional richness to the site applications with extra computing power to execute applications such as simulation (“What if”), for training, knowledge systems, and cross plant applications such as history, information, and decision support. The development of security architectures that accommodate the cloud for industrial space, where security access is handled external to plants fire walls, combined with the plant firewalls, providing significant security.

Another example comes from a recent paper from Analysts ARC on MOM/MES customer interviews which stated:

“Another implementation timesaver to look for is the availability of cloud-based MOM/MES system for development. Compared to waiting for on – site servers and data bases to be acquired, deployed, and configured; the cloud-based  system can be often be provisioned in a few hours so the team can get right to work. If templates are also used stake holders can immediately begin to make system decisions that otherwise might take weeks or months to reach and base these on the best possible information, the actual system behavior.”

As we have seen over the last 6 to 8 months the discussion grows around using the cloud, especially as the cloud based industrial applications continue to be released to market, and the next 6 months will see a step increase in these. The time has come to understand what the requirement is for the  business ,then ask the question which is the best way to implement this in a scalable and affordable low risk manner.

Role of IT changing from Central IT to Consultant IT as new devices/ and services become absorbed into the industrial architecture?

I thought this paper (below) introduced a fascinating discussion on the changing role of IT, from central IT to more of a guideline, consultant to management of devices and services in an organization. In the industrial space,  we have seen leading companies go from enforcing mobile device (the one issued by the company) to issuing one, but also allowing employees to bring in their private preference of the device and connect it to the corporate network and use it in the day a to day work job.

 This research is necessary, because it reflects and profiles a new order in directing and controlling the use of information technology, which we need to expand » 

Business Leaders Spending On Technology Because It's Too Important To Let I.T. Go It Alone

www.forbes.com

By John McCarthy In the Forrester report, "Tracking the Renegade Technology Buyer", we uncover the motivations and technology spending priorities of over 1,000 John McCarthy North American and European business executives. The data from the Forrsights Business Decision Maker Survey was collected in Q4, 2012. Of the 891 respondents that had a budget [...]

This trend will only continue as the Gen Y and Gen X will not put up with different experiences, therefore different operational processes. Another trend is the rapid mind switch from having to build specific applications for me or my plant/ role, to accepting “good enough” applications that can be down loaded and up and running in minutes, with limited configuration. Providing a significant increase in information available and for that last 20 to 30% that comes with custom systems people are questioning the time, cost and sustainability. This mind shift has come with home, commercial experience of the applications on the “Application stores” just search and select one and accept the value it brings the expectation is not that I can customize it significantly.

Example the applications below provide in a 10 minute setup and download (as long as the site has the remote connector that publishes the data to the cloud in a secure manner) 80% of the information many roaming workers need. Is it ideal layout reports in standard corporate format no, but it is “good enough” and is self serviced by the user delivering significantly more information than they have today.

On the back end systems,  the same is happening as the acceptance of SAAS and managed services within the Industrial Operational architecture grows, the need to have IT infrastructure reduces ut the capability grows in computing and capability by leveraging the service provider. IT will have to manage these service providers and plug them into the industrial architecture in a secure way that is aligned with the IT guidelines of cooperation.

One discussion this week was with large process company, and they said why would they use “cloud” in their operations they have covered in their industrial automation/ operations systems. This contradicted the operations team in the same company who are concerned about operational continuity and uptime, and with the increasing upgrades, security patches, they looking for the maintaining vital decision support capability at higher availability, a key advantage of a managed service is the increased availability. Combine this with the need to increase the information on an issue to a worker so decisions can be made faster. The discussion shifted to the requirement for understanding the “future” through “what ifs” and how that can be made available to all workers. This is near real-time activity, and could e a service hosted in the cloud (public or private) consumed by the users as needed,not all the time, but the computing power will need to elastic. It was not long before the IT member of the discussion was seeing the opportunity, and asking more questions, this will be increasing situation/ discussion over the next 12 months in the industrial sector.  

The growing influence of operations, and how to empower operational decisions in an increasing climate of workforce transition, and rotation, the acceptance by IT of using my device, and allowing these applications. Shifting IT’s role from not providing as this is coming from out side either with the device or from the service provider, but to consultant that provides guidelines and maintains the integrity of the security system.

Interesting thought and trend!  

Operational Advantage will accelerate “Managed Services” Cloud adoption in the Industrial Sector!!!!

For the last couple of weeks, I seem to have ended up in a whirlpool of activity and interest around the cloud in the industrial landscape, not just from within Invensys, but also in the customer community. A world away from a year ago when it was hard to strike up a conversation of any reality around cloud in the industrial landscape. So I called a few people in the field and people who had approached us, or our partners and in a discovery mode as to what is driving them and why now?

There is a lot of speculation on why and who will adopt cloud technologies, this discussion will focus on historian/ process data in a managed service which is certainly one of the initial adoption areas in the industrial landscape, but certainly just one possibilities in the industrial landscape. Looking at the initial adopters of Cloud there will different reasons based upon the size of the organizations.

Early adoption of managed services will be the small business that do not have limited IT resources, who are also having to grapple with the changing consumer of the market, who need access to industrial information traditionally only for the control rooms.

Speaking with one company in the water industry, they have had SCADA systems years, with the data stored and available for analysis within a small community of people with access to this SCADA system. The changing market is requiring that this data be available for a larger community of people whom most are not situated at the plant, and in some cases are not even apart of the company. They also concerned that do not know how big this community will grow, and locations, and do not want dilute their core business focus of water management in building solutions. They not looking for a “cloud” solution they looking for a “Managed Solution” owned and executed by experts focused on these information systems. The interview drew for business jobs/ objectives they want and some clear associated desired outcomes.

Speed to value solution with minimal risk was high up on the list, they did not want wait around for solutions, they believe that the functionality must already exist and why re engineer  vs evolve from existing solutions. Key in this requirement was the need not drain vital internal resources in capital, or people.

Also, high on the list was increased availability, and removal of the “never ending circle of upgrades” this is for hardware and software, the resources needed, and most of all the loss in availability. By going external experts will manage this with the correct hardware and software capacity to maintain a higher availability.

Metering of costs became a topic it was not the reduction in cost, but the metering of cost that can increase as more value or capacity used, but also the ability to understand where the capacity is being used, by what departments or customers so the charges will be allocated to them directly. Instead of going through the endless Capex cycles for doing projects especially in the semi public sector.

Lastly it was scalability, the elasticity to change capacity not bigger but also smaller, to changed geographical consumption. They explained that new community is expending, the roles are changing, locations, but they have also seen contraction and then expansion again, this is hard to deal with in a internal project. Managed services will be able to deal with this change and cost will vary accordingly.

For large customers with IT departments many of challenges and drivers are the same but on a different scale, also the cloud also presents the opportunity commoditize the traditional data centers which are costly to maintain. The adoption in these bigger industries will less aggressive as they look at Private Cloud (not a long way from the old main frames), but even here there is a significant mind shift in the last 6 months.

Certainly on the small plants, sites there should be a significant debate as to why put “a server” on site for the company to maintain, when the common infrastructure is expanding so rapidly that off loading this unknown  to a “managed service” which can absorb the variability by spreading risk and capability over multiple customers. Especially when “managed services” will provide significant agility, operational flexibility and expandability at speed. As I stated a couple of weeks ago, "Managed Services" and "cloud computing" will enable a new dimension for the industrial architecture, the next significant leap through scalability, expertise capacity and cost, lifting it from the traditional architectures. The question is how far is the future again do not think it is years, think months. Especially as company leaders shift from thinking “managed services” as possible cost saving to delivering significant operational advantage.

 

Expanding from a Process/ Plant to Holistic Landscape will fuel the debate of “on premise vs off premise”!

I had an an editor speak to me this week about “the shift to Multi Plant view across the industrial landscape, then he mentioned cloud is a dream in Industry”. Quickly correcting him that it should not be a shift to multi plant view versus an expansion on top of the existing local/ remote operational view, and “cloud” is truly real especially with virtual teams, and multi site. This confusion is common at the moment with some vendors and consultants pushing the Enterprise Historian view that really focuses on only one perpective in operations, that of the analyst performance team. That does not mean there is a swing to a new architecture, the architecture must support at least the two communities of interest with different views:

• Operational day to day teams: requiring a view focused on limited time span e.g.| 7 days and view one process or plant
• Planning, Management, Performance / optimization teams and expert support teams : wants to look at broader view across sites, and broader time span of months and years usually offline for analysis, and strategic thinking.

The expansion to holistic view will also push the debate of the industrial architecture, to a combination of:

• On Premise computing: The local plants with real time needs and short time spans will often have the required information and capability local on premise. This can apply also apply in a remote operational center infrastructure which is still local to the remote site, or on the site and just virtualized to the center.
• Off Premise computing: The shifting of data, analysis, and actions to an off premise computing, either specialised data center, or “cloud” etc, private or public, freeing up the local operational day to day infrastructure from this heavily lifting. Providing also the ideal opportunity merge and consolidate a view and capability across the industrial landscape of a company, this will involve storage, but also realtime model of the production, and operational awareness activities across the different teams.

In the blog on 2020 the following characteristics were expected:

· One in three employees will be working casual, part-time or project base vs career in a company.

· The average tenure in a job / role will be 2.4 years

· One in four workers will be working remotely and virtually.

The ability to see information and data in a near realtime, view according to my focus is key no matter what current device or location being used. The ability to connect, collaborate and share advice is key to decisions in the now and the ability share knowledge when the average experience in a role will be less than 2 years The holistic view will drive many parts of the architecture “off premise” into a managed service.

Three times in a week one in mining two in food, from companies across the world, I was asked to comment on an “End to End” view of information, and especially state. One for operational effectiveness and agility, the other for reduction in delayed time in achieving a “positive release” of products to customers. In both cases the company IT and thought leaders raised both “cloud” and “big data “ techniques. As I mentioned last week, the acceleration in acceptance of these technologies is astounding in the last 6 months.

The mixed reaction to last week blog many agreeing, many debating the reality, but for the second camp, I think they unaware of cost, technology updates, and the expectation of the new generation for doing things fast. Also, there is a shift to be able to buy this holistic capability as  services  vs total up front.

I fundamentally believe that, within 2,  years,  we will laugh at this debate of “on premise” vs “off premise” in the industrial landscape, the modern aligned and agile business will have  an industrial/ operational architecture that naturally applies both On and Off premise computing. “On premise” computing reducing to “only required data/ computing to satisfy the limited operational time span, e.g.| 7days even shorter” everything else will be “off premise”. The landscapes will enable users to view content device independent and across the landscape, but drilling to a plant and process, collaborating across the virtual team from site to corporate to worldwide experts.

Certainly over the next 2 years the expansion in Invensys’s portfolio capability spanning local to enterprise landscape, and include both “on premise” and “off premise” as well as managed services as not a specialty but a natural way to grow value from your systems.

Do Traditional Reports have a Role in the Agile Industrial Operations World of today and tomorrow?

This is a question that keeps coming up, and product managers/ engineers keep saying we need reports, but in some many ways they are confused between the past and the reality of NOW decisions today. “Today” the need for “Operational Decision” data which is the status now, and over a short time span, with the ability to discover conditions, causes, through relationships, to make “Now” decisions. These are not traditional reports which display a pre defined period and fixed formate. Also, the concept of Dashboards, predefined Gadgets on the desktop, mobile device that act like tickers. All of this is about empowerment of the NOW and reports do fit this role, so do traditional reports have a future????

This discussion has raged on for the last few years, and certainly there many mixed feelings on this, causing disjointed information approachers in Companies and from vendors supplying the solutions and products. This is not surprising as this typical of an area going through a dramatic paradigm shift in use, users, and the role, and it is happening and changing so fast, plus the merging of business information into the common strategies brings a new culture to plant.

Yes, traditional reports will have a role, but a more accurate definition of a “report” will be a “printable report”, with a definition of:

• Layout are fixed format that enables print out
• The print out could be paper, or PDF or other formats
• Well determined data/ information for a specific role, event.
• Triggered on a regular event e.g.| shift, day, end of batch.

These reports  records that used as apart of the audit of company, product, or production, for delivery records, and operations records especially as regulations requirements continue to increase.  The new generation of workers and the people coming from the business applications will expect more in what is referred to as “operational information”. This is real time information, situational awareness, and process analysis, ad hoc navigation through the information to bring awareness of conditions.

Most people are already using “gadgets” on the desktop, or mobile faceplate, for weather, stocks etc, providing instant awareness. I use these for weather, time in different parts of the world and exchange rates on my iPad and desktop saving the time to search on line. Vendors are developing industrial measure “tickers” (dials) that bring instant awareness of the key information people are interested in. Example is seen below of set of potential indicators for an industrial environment.

 

Typical industrial dials, will become "gadgets"

 

The association process data and operational context

 

“Search” will become a natural concept like “Google” new search services will start to be delivered that enable people to search, query across the “lake of industrial data and information” leveraging the navigational information  models that will be provided over the industrial data sources in order to enable this operational decision support.

Yes,  the world is changing, services in information will move to online that is a natural place, to allow the people across the distributed/ virtual enterprise access to the realtime, information in a consistent way.This year  historians will move into the cloud from Invensys and other vendors, but the real advantage of the virtual cloud will come with information, leaving the data sources local.

Tools used will be range based upon those the worker is most comfortable with, why would a business person who works in say SAP’s Business Objects want a different tool to access the required industrial operations information for their decisions. The traditional thinking by vendors and industrial people that all industrial analysis tools are provided by the industrial vendors and specialised for this space is flawed. As the community of people accessing this operational industrial information increases.

So the industrial vendors will shift their focus to providing the information model that enables navigating and information consumption by a range of standard “office” and “Business Intelligence” tools. Yes,  these industrial vendors like Invensys will provide specialized presentation, and analysis content tools that work in these other environments but provide a workflow that aligns with the industrial thinking and approach.

I will expand on this evolution of information over the next couple of weeks, but Printable Reports will exist, but they probably will be 10 to 15% of what will be used in the daily plant operations for realtime  decisions.