Industrial Internet of Things, enables going beyond the 4 walls of a Plant, to Mobile Plant Supply Chain

The last two blogs on the “Cyber Physical and Operational Management Evolution” and “How do you Achieve Orchestration in Industrial Internet of Things without Managed Configurations and Standards?” have created a lot of activity in hits but also email discussions.

This is good to see as two years ago these subjects would have hardly moved the needle, and they real opportunities for leading companies to embrace to expand their capabilities beyond the four walls of their plant.

Again last week I was involved in a number of discussions around these topics and liked one of my South African collaborators discussing how we have all these rich applications and capabilities for the fixed process plants, WHY cannot we apply these same tools to “MOBILE PLANT”?  Now he was from mining and was launching into the extraction side of mining and how to optimize the asset utilization, but he really wanted to go beyond that “Operational Optimization”.

The targets are not about data, what I like he is putting real operational goals in place:

• Operational Processes optimization, understand operational times vs expected times and analysis of areas to improve
•  Asset utilization / optimization
•  Energy and Fuel optimization

As he put we have platforms in the plants that abstract equipment below, and model these equipment so we can record, track their operations, and then apply operational process improvements, and built in operational process rules for the fixed plant. Now taking this to mobile these same platforms could be used but now across mobile equipment, so now we must record geographical data as core as location is key when using fuel, doing operational routes, and time is of essence. But the Delay accounting applications of today could be applied to these mobile equipment and we could then move beyond that to embedding operational best practices and operational behavior in the devices, and equipment to guide the operations to work within the “operational windows” of optimized performance.  

The diagram below shows a more detailed chart of maturities I mentioned last week. The concept of smart, to optimized and autonomous can only come with inbuilt operational strategies and practices that enable the orchestration I talked about last week.

Source ARC (arcweb.com).

The key is most of the mining extraction/ mobile plant is isolated, and I would say siloed even when connected between applications.

Remember the Industrial Internet of things is not about data, it is about “actionable decisions” in the NOW, by either machines, applications or people, and this will require embedded operational strategies/ processes that coordinate the mobile equipment to align with the overall business strategies.

If you are looking in the plant / fixed process world to apply IOT and gain significant value, you should think again and “open the door” and look outside the plant to mobile plant, or mobile supply chain, and extend the richness of operational applications to these traditionally isolated equipment and processes! 

Information vs Data Leads Discussion on the Future of Operations!

“Gather all the plant data and analyze afterwards” are common words you hear about the market, but when the discussion happens this approach a “putting head in the sand” approach, with limited bigger picture consideration. Today the key to agility is empowerment of decisions and actions in the NOW. This does not require data it requires trustworthy, in context information.  The last couple of weeks has enabled some fascinating and productive engagements. In a discussion,  last week at a Mining Thought leadership on the future a sizable group of interested people attended and took part in discussions.  

A key concept of “mine of the future” and actually for most industries oil and gas, power, food etc. is the agility to take more holistic operational view of the system and day to day operations. This requires alignment at 3 loops (the diagram illustrates these loops) of operations with the alignment in decision and actions. Foundational to this is the information that decisions are based on, requires not HISTORIANS but Plant/ Operational Information Systems, that align information and actions for effective use my different operational roles. Companies that make this foundational move will have a system where data structure, validation is “managed” not coded, that the system is trust worthy so people will depend on and use the system.

To many times the discussion with mining and process end users who are implementing an information system for increased decisions support, that they require a re look at the data sources and how to put it in context, and validated. An example of this was a coal company in South Africa they had spent significant time working on an information system and the historians and data warehouses, but lost effectiveness through:

• Data alignment across sources, E.g.| Finding different data streams that effected the same asset calculation for say energy.
• Data validation
• Data structure

The conversation remarkably quickly ended up going back to redo of the structure of data coming into the historians, and getting this data structured, validated before it went into historian. They had two choices either going to source in this case PLCs and adjusting the running code (not a smart idea), or put a structuring layer in which would structure the data, validate the data, and provide high availability and single names space to manage over the distributed historians.

This is a departure from the story he was told that just put a historian in and capture the data worry about analysis afterwards, that is old and in effective saying. As discussed in the “mine of the future” discussions  the challenge is to “federate” the existing data sources on a plant, E.g.| Historians, alarm event data logs, operator logs, and delay, downtime data bases, E.g.| The alignment of the data sources into effective information that actions can be taken. The concept of “self service” becomes necessary, as there was a lot of comment around of trying to minimize the process analysis phase and role in the data, and try to get effective information to operational people quickly. Another example is an oil and gas plant’s decision system that is effectively been run 24 hours out of phase with the plant, by only have decision able reports/ dashboards from the past 24 hours at 2 to 3 in the afternoon so. Again this delay was due to data gathering, data alignment, validation, in MS Excel manually done by 3 people, the company was exploring ways to eliminate this manual creation, so the whole process is “near real time”.

A clear message from the last couple of weeks is we need to step back, align the existing systems, to provide that key foundation for operational empowerment, absorb significant milestones such as advancement in the communication infrastructures; Example putting 4G communications in the Pilbra mining area (remote north western Australia), providing significant data capability. (A topic for next week). This need to absorbed into the industrial / operational Architecture, internet will be a natural part of the backbone, leveraging computing power remotely for functions, such as storage, analysis, model running, help accelerate the decision support.