Industrial Internet of Things: What does it mean to me?

I must have sat through 3 to four presentations of IoT in the last 2 weeks from different vendors, different industries. Combine this active strategic discussions within our development teams, you see many angles and thought approaches.

ARC’s definition:

“The industrial internet of things is a collection of technologies that can come together in a targeted  solution to improve business performance and machine availability”.

The key is the transition to information driven system has begun and it is about alignment of devices, process and people, to be effective in real-time agile production. Extending across the plant, and the whole value supply chain, providing transparency in end to end operations.

All are valid, but the question was asked on a site visit last week " what does it mean to us?". So I stood up and went to white board and drew three circles and intersected them, to represent the opportunity.

As you can see below in the diagram below:

The three circles were

1/ The Capital Assets, these a non-living devices, such as instruments, machines, motors, conveyors, tanks, PLCs, DCS, RTUs, switch gear, etc.

2/ The Human Assets: all the workers and roles no matter of location, if they employees, contractors, consultants, but are required for the efficient, timely operation of the production facility.

3/ The Operational, Product Processes, procedures that applied across multiple capital assets, across workers, and between chapati all assets and workers to gain consistent operations, production. Increased production consistency, increased utilization of all resources both capital and human assets, making the most effective use of resources such as materials and energy.

To many people refer to IoT are just looking at assets and smart devices, and moving to asset management, this is only a initial step, when you improve operational productivity out of the plant is when the paradigm of value is achieved. To me it is not just about smart devices, it is about combining this with proven production procedures, processes across the different assets in plant, both human and capital in order to gain must effective, efficient production.

Taking the customer a little by surprise, as they just been hearing about smart devices, but when brought relative to their plant reality sank in. Why is different to the traditional approach, is that when you think as in diagram below (from ARC) maturity of devices in the IoT as they become smarter to autonomous.

The devices, assets such as packaging machines, motors, pumps, agitators become fully aware of what is running in them, What they are meant to produce and how Their ability to achieve the desired result Their health and readiness to perform to expected capabilities. 

The machines move to been just apart of the team, enabling awareness to operational workers as early as possible of abnormal conditions that will effect production output, so " actionable decisions" can be taken. So when I walked around their plant I found the human assets all the different roles, and there were many, today they running between fixed work stations, looking uncomfortable in executing tasks, and doing paper inputs all over the place, totally in adhoc actions.

In the potential new world the human assets, are empowered with devices, from small, to tablets, to PCS, but they aware, connected, and the ability understand the situation. Combine this with the move to embed experience in the systems, so actionable steps can be taken in timely manner no matter where the worker is.

So the worker is :

• Now aware instantly of an up coming situation
• They can understand the context immediately
•  They can make a decision
•  They can take an action

All happening in real-time, no delays, and coordinated through exception based machines, processes, and embedded experience, so now assets, production and human workers are working as one.

Walking around this plant last week, the opportunity to take small steps in a coordinated operations and empower the workers to be effective, will yield significant returns. The internet of things in the industrial context is taking the operational / production co-ordination we have today to another level, extending the scope and understanding of workers, buy making capital assets and human assets apart of aligned team through embedded operational practices/ procedures. 

Business Control Loop Concept Critical for Continued Process Improvement.

Nearly all customers/ end users I am talking with across multiple industries have a “lean/ performance program” looking at business processes and supply chain. Many have adopted techniques such as Lean/ Six Sigma, and many have a dedicated team investigating and driving performance thinking across the different aspects of the business.

The diagram below came from ARC on a survey they did, but it is the best depiction I have seen how the leading customers gain an advantage by embedding processes vs just training and manual implementation. The leading companies are looking take this embedded process, to the operational space, and again this becomes critical in the “rotating” worker world.

In the last 5 years we have seen significant increase in so called MES applications been applied, this could be in Batch, MES, Quality, KPIs, but really what is happening is that a “Business Control Loop” is being implemented. Based on a business process the operational execution procedure best practice is implemented in a workflow/ process. This is then rolled out across multiple sites/ or like processes. This does now restrict the freedom on how to execute this process, but in turn you gain the consistency in execution, and ability to understand execution and where to improve by reducing variation. This naturally solves to issues:

·         The ability to gain consistent execution over different sites/ cultures

·         The consistency of execution across shifts/ operational teams, but most of all as we go into the transition of staff through rotating roles (discussed in early blogs “The Perfect storm in Industrial Operations= People Excellence Feb 2012”). As one customer stated we have design to assume limited experience, through embedded procedures you immediately solve this by an worker being able to understand a situation, and the associated activity and be provided with recommended procedures to work them through this.

These procedures can and should have built in help and self-training even built in certification if needed so there is a record that the worker has gone through the online training, and now the procedure will guide him through.

The leading companies are now building this capture of best practices into “embedded processes” as they learn them, even dedicating the more senior members of the team to document their experience in procedures that can be then embedded. In many ways traditional MES products with their routes and operations enforce this process in the product execution, but we now finding this happening in process and utilities.

This is why we saw the need to build in ArchestrA Workflow as a natural extension to the ArchestrA application model, not an add-on, not a BPM (Business Process tool) but as an operational process extension to the real-time supervisory and control system. Just a simple thing as an alarm can now have workflow monitoring it, based on other conditions and alarm could be generated but due to the other conditions in the plant a workflow may automatically escalate the situation and notify potentially others. What we have done is taken knowledge and built a situational aware capability, which aligned with the best practices the company wants to implement. We are seeing the same approach on NPI (new product introduction) where one of the biggest challengers is to enter the correct set-up data across multiple operational systems. The room for error is huge and lost time in revalidating and fault finding not counting lost production time and waste. Implementing procedures and alignment of data models is a big step in the correct direction. The whole focus on "Operational Safety" that naturally embeds best practices into day to day operations to avoid safety sistuations, is another example.

So when you looking at designing operational/ supervisory systems, you need to think of it not as a project but a journey. Yes the initial project gets you to a certain value and point, but the culture should be a continuous one of looking to capture best practices and embed them (so this must be a natural act not an exception), so the new value and improvements are gained for all as you learn. This requires a change in both the products vendors supply and the way in which endusers and engineering houses go about implimenting operational execution programs, but there is no choice if they are stay compeditive.