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.

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.   

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.  

Why Enterprise Control ? Why not a traditional automation / MES like system?

No longer can we think automation/ MES system as we did in the 90s and 2000s, they will not satisfy, more importantly we cannot have many systems working in isolation, there is too much data, and speed for decisions is critical. This does not mean replace these systems (they basically work, and execute) we need to UNIFY, extend and align these into one PROACTIVE OPERATIONAL SYSTEM. This could be across one plant or across and “Industrial Enterprise” made up of multiple plants that make up the supply chain, or the operational capacity for the enterprise.

“Products and services can be copied. Our business/ operational processes and our business models are our differentiators.” 

  CEO – Global Enterprise (2011)

This quote captures a lot, products and services are commodities in this “flat world”, the differentiator will be on business and operational processes. How dynamic the business is relative to how quickly they can adapt these processes from strategy to business and operational practices and rollout across their industrial capacity into executing practices that are consistently executed.   

So what is Enterprise Control? No matter if this is the correct name or not (there will be many names in the market), to us it refers to an operational system (over one plant or over the enterprise plants) that aligns business processes / strategies from the business system, to proven operational processes that efficiently execute them in a timely manner by empowering and orchestrating the operational systems(automation controls, MES, Batch, optimization), and operational knowledge workers.

When asked what it provides in a short comment this is what I answer with:

The Enterprise Control Vision is to provide a set of capability that enables customers to achieve "Operational Excellence” through three strategies:

·         Empowerment of Operational People

Operational personnel (e.g. operators, process engineers, process experts, maintenance, quality, production management) are empowered in real-time to make decisions through operational awareness, access to experience, collaboration, and best practices in a pro-active system.

·         Unification through Federation across assets, applications and systems

Align the different assets and processes across the operational management layer (of the traditional automation levels) so that the industrial operations are more agile.  These assets that reside within a plant, process and across multiple sites are aligned to business and operational processes, and require consistent measures and information. So that each of the existing applications/ controls continue to run, but their models are aligned, and communication happens with orchestration execution, in order for the Operational Process to execute in the most timely and effective manner.

·         Built on a Sustainable platform of capability so that the system has longevity to evolve.

ECS will be implemented in stages and evolve in scope, breadth and functionality through its lifetime at each customer installation, which could be 20 years.  The system has been engineered and architected in a way that enables this evolution to occur in a sustainable way and caters to changing engineering teams and technologies.   

Over the next couple of weeks I will expand my thoughts, what I am hearing when talking to industry thought leaders, and what is possible and we investigating, looking at in concepts. What you should be thinking about. As a traditional approach to building a Operational System will not work there are significant differences, but “rip and replace” has no place either. So understanding the concept of Federation is important in this industrial sense stay tuned.

I often get asked this question, mainly from engineers, but when I speak with Operational people in all industries the focus has shifted from controlling the process, (this is assumed as most people are on at least second generation controllers) to controlling the profit and production. This means operational dynamics/ agility so decisions are made in NOW by all operational people no matter the role.

Over the next couple of weeks I will expand on the changes I am seeing and we looking at relative to addressing what some people are referring to as the biggest operational evolution since the industrial revolution. The “day in the life” of modern operational worker coming out of this recession is forever changed. As the market is not recovering from GFC,  it is fundamentally being RESET to a new operational paradigm in this “flat world” with a transition to a new generation of digital workers.