Time for “Off the Shelf” Operations/ MES Solution

As I sit on another plane heading across the Pacific from California, I have time to reflect on the discussions both this week, and over the last 6 months, with leading food and beverage and process companies.

The growing trend in the MES space, (which the dominate solution is “custom solutions”), is to replace these systems with “off the shelf” products, enabling companies to focus on the core business. This trend is similar to the ERP space in the 90s, and initially in the MES space in the late 90s, and 2000s, but MES solutions of this time did not deliver the complete solution, and the eventual solutions have become unsustainable for the “operational journey”. Thousands of sites have installed MES Products from Invensys and other vendors, that are  highly successfully having run for over decade delivering significant value, but this time around there is more functionality capability people want, the architecture is not just one plant but multiple, and tolerance for custom code has significantly dropped. So why? And why now?

Reflecting on the discussions across many industries from process, mining, food, beverage, and general manufacturing, there are some common threads to the demise of “custom MES”:

·    The customer MES solutions are functionally very rich exceeding the traditional functional definitions of MESA etc with inbuilt operational practices in code, often focused on only a plant’s needs. The pace of change in operations, and pressure for new capability is growing both in capability and time to deliver.

·    Opportunities have moved from one plant to multiple plant, in order to provide the consistency and agility across the industrial landscape. Requiring significant governance, and alignment both in execution and information.

·    There is a younger generation (Gen X born 1960 to 80s) at the CIO and engineering level that have grown up with “packaged software”, and know that it works and should be leveraged.

·     Rotating staff in all roles requires faster time to experience, requiring embedded operational practices across plants.

It is also necessary to note that the MES solutions on the market where developed from a level 3 point of view yet when applied they must interact with the plant automation systems, as well as the many workers across the plants.

There were two areas of solution that contributed to the custom code:

Automation Layer Integartion:

Since the MES Products originated from level 3 specialized supplies (even if they are now apart of automation companies their origins came from standalone companies) the plant floor integration was external to MES  model using OPC etc, requiring significant custom code in the automation layer was to validate the event, and data. A sustainable solution requires  level 2 and 3 systems natively modeled, with minimal custom code as illustrated below.  The ability to configure (not code) a set of equipment templates, that model the equipment (entities) with built in supervisory capability as well as operational capability for such things as production data capture, quality sampling, utilization capture etc. Rolling these templates out over multiple sites, providing a consistent automated production event/ data capture.

Client, Human Interface:

The second area of significant coding on the first generation of MES solutions was at the client or user interface that captures manual data, at production event generation. The data  validation is required as close to source, requiring significant custom code that guides the data entry for the  user with constructive feedback. Also, the  job never seemed to finish with the operational practices continuing to change/ evolve as the companies operational practices evolved. In the above solution workflow combined with form generation and interaction, enables change and evolution in a sustainable manner.”Activity” specific interfaces and associated workflows will guide the user through the activity, and interface to MES capability capturing the required information.

The above approach is a full MES/ Operations architecture, that enables the configuration of embedded operational practices of a site and company, but in “off the shelf” products, faster solution delivery and in a more sustainable way. In many ways, this adding of realtime natural interface, combined with workflow for human interaction and embedded operational procedures extends the traditional MES capability as defined by “MESA or ISA 95” to be  a second generation that does have the opportunity to be adopted across 1000s of plants.  

Does Master Data Management does it Apply in Industry

 This again most automation engineers and plant personal look at me with a "blank look". But those in the business side / IT understand the need and challenge. But the real question does this have a chance to really work in the operations level 3 space, let's have discussion around this.

As Gerhard Greeff – Divisional Manager at Bytes Systems Integration put it in his paper"When last did you revisit your MOM?"

"Master Data Management (MDM)

The third proof of this conservative thinking is that very few manufacturing technologists have ever heard of Master Data Management (or MDM) and fewer understand what this actually mean. Enterprise solutions have long relied on MDM systems to ensure naming consistency and data translation between disparate enterprise-level solutions. Manufacturing has not even given this a thought as can be seen by the proliferation of point-to-point interfaces between systems."

Around the 2000 time, I like many of the MES linked people were looking at how to integrate to ERP systems through EAI etc, and we found ourselves on many inter- operative meetings. Discussing how bring S95 to reality, how can lower the risk, and engineering in this interoperability. Now 10 years on the EAI approach has worked for some companies, but as one of them said to me that 10% of the challenge and inter operative communication, synching is between the ERP and MES/ Operations. Actually 90% is at the ISA level 3 and it is as another company put" the invisible barrier, limitation to achieving industrial agility".

 

So what are we referring to is that there are so many applications in the operations areas which will come from different vendors or the different applications are focused on their area that their model approach is so very different. Yet for agility these different operational applications need to stay current and aligned, today this is ver manual alignment or custom code. Example I had one customer talk about DCS to Historian, and MES they make 16000 changes in their DCS systems every 6 months, and how do they make sure the configuration changes align across these 3 systems. Example if you have these three system modeling the same tank, one system generation alarms, one history, and the other batch, the size of the tank is key to all three. Now the plant is changed and the tank capacity is increased now one system is changed eg DCS but the others are not because they do fall under responsibility of the plant engineer. There is no system to say that there at least systems that depend on this master data, so many companies would start up totally unaware of the possible dangers. One company commented they find 80% of their miss alignment after start up.

This is where the opportunity for "master data management" comes to the front in industrial systems.

But some people state that we need to do is put all master data in one DB and every system access this, I would challenge this is not the correct path. It would lead to duplication of data, and performance and sustainability night mares.

The manufacturing data management needs to be a reference capability that allows the core data and models to stay in the original systems, and awareness of updates that are needed.

You should be asking yourself how can you do SOA and the service bus approach without this “industrial master data management" capability, especially when it goes outside the known data models and you use the SOA to federate external applications with their own data models.

Yes it is needed, I have seen at least 8 projects where different custom systems are being built. But all of these are custom, and really just links, and have little chance of being sustainable.

I hope I have opened food for thought.

Now that I have started the thought process we can expand next week, expand on my views and Gerhard's  how this applied in Industry, as the industrial market needs to open up to looking at tools to manage this. 

Manufacturing 2.0 what is it?

If you have been watching AMR now Gartner for the past 3 years they introduced the concepts of “Manufacturing 2.0", which looked at where manufacturing and industrial architectures could go. Many of the concepts were not new, but they did a good job showing a whole picture and the components needed to make this architecture real. Too often you get a concept thrown forward but it is only part of what is required, and people miss the whole picture.

But this concept of Manufacturing 2.0 has been picked up by MESA in their push on educating the market, and they now run certification courses on the concept of Manufacturing 2.0. These courses are good for hybrid, discrete and process companies and system integrators, even if you have been doing MES for years you will learn techniques and concepts.

The diagram below shows two levels of Manufacturing 2.0, one from the enterprise level, where the manufacturing is fitting into a corporate SOA architecture. Down in the bottom right hand corner is “manufacturing”, now the second diagram drills into the next level, showing a real SOA architecture in industrial landscape.

I was having dinner Gerhard Greeff last week who trains the MESA courses on Manufacturing 2.0. I have known Gerhard a couple years he has written some good papers on the topic, (especially one titled “When was the last time you saw your MOM?”) and it is always rewarding debating concepts, and validating many of the areas we working on.

Some key points we discussed what they call the Manufacturing Service Bus, and our proposal and work around what we developing called the ArchestrA Service Bus, which is a true web service bus, for the industrial landscape. This is currently going into beta and will be released in it' s initial form with data services in the System Platform 2012R2 releases due at the end of the year. The data services will be just an inherent component/ function of the ArchestrA infrastructure extending it to enterprise and multi-site. A first step to what we refer to as ArchestrA 2.0 our new evolution of the core technology and architecture of system that will go to enterprise.

You can think of ArchestrA 1.0 as unifying the plant, and ArchestrA 2.0 as unifying the industrial enterprise, which is where many companies are coming to. Allow multiple plants to become “loosely coupled but aligned", with standards driven over the sites, yet the uniqueness, individualism of the sites is sustained. Too many companies say they are SOA, but it is key to using true services, that have defined contracts, that will be sustained through changes of technology and versions. As we move towards Federation of more than automation systems but other applications and multiple sites that implemented differently the ability align, and relate data models through standard contracts will be key.

The challenge I have with “Manufacturing 2.0” being rolled out is that there is not an “off the shelf “ sustainable solution to achieve the goal. Because the other main goal required beyond aligned federation is to have solutions that are sustainable “limit custom code”. Can you build services YES, but it is key to build them into your architecture and culture to make them sustainable, that is why we working on many evolutions to achieve Federation in a sustainable manner. Let’s discuss this over the next couple of weeks.