by Gary Mintchell | Mar 30, 2012 | Operations Management
My friend Jim Pinto loves the word paradigm. I tend to think it is overused. But I choose it carefully here. We are on the verge of finally getting to the Second Industrial Divide–or return to the root of manufacturing as craftsmanship built atop everything learned and developed in the Industrialization Age.
Many industries still need economies of scale. And we’ve gone through the thought process of mass customization. Some of these things fall into the realm of discrete manufacturing. But even in certain process industries there is a return to smaller, craft processes. Not only do we have a plethora of craft breweries, I saw last weekend where Ohio has approved a small, craft distillery (my great-grandmother made “bathtub gin” during Prohibition, but that probably doesn’t count in the same way).
Check out this TED Talk by Lisa Harouni on 3D printing–or printing as a production process. Sometimes you can make products that way that simply can’t be manufactured any other way.
Or here is an article on the technology blog TechCrunch about Plukka, a jewelery company that makes your jewelery on demand.
This can even happen in publishing where small “blogs” otherwise known as magazines without overhead can overtake established magazines. (No, I have no yearning to do that…yet.)
But maybe you can take your controls expertise and knowledge of manufacturing into some interesting areas. Worth thinking about.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 28, 2012 | Software
Big data and analysis, SEO ruining America, software complexity and “going with the flow” as part of the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Big data requires big analysis
Last week I interviewed GE Intelligent Platforms Business Leader for Software, Erik Udstuen, about what was happening lately. He talked about leveraging the company’s historian and analysis tools in the service of asset excellence.
As a bonus, here is a podcast from IT Conversations discussing big data and analysis. From the Website, “Did you know California’s entire research network of educational institutions, kindergarten through college, now empties directly into Amazon’s cloud storage system? From data generated by thousands of Web 2.0 companies every second to terabytes of data generated by government at every level; this may be the golden age of data set collection. In this presentation Werner Vogels defines Big Data, examines the challenges that big data creates, and invites everyone to consider the types of innovation necessary to handle them.”
Pizza tastes better than broccoli
For years I pondered how to make money writing, and then Jane Gerold, then at Control Engineering, introduced me to business-to-business (B2B) publications. So, now I’m a writer but also involved deeply in publishing. And make a nice living doing it. I was a Web person before I was a print person, so I really watch the Web space. One of the biggest ideas of the past 8 years or so has been Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Recently someone leaked an AOL (Huffington Post) memo about the “AOL Way” where editors were instructed to only write articles relating to terms or information that provoked the greatest number of clicks per Google. In other words, don’t write things that will provide new information and get readers to think–rather write short things that reinforce opinions already held.
For your listening pleasure, another IT Conversations podcast “Is SEO Killing America?” From the Website, “Does pizza taste better than broccoli? If you’re like most people, you’re going to answer pizza. It should come as no surprise then, that many health experts point to our preference for unhealthy food as a leading cause for the obesity problem in the United States. Clay Johnson suggests that a similar trend is happening in the way we consume content. In this keynote, Clay illustrates how our web preferences are impacting the type of content media companies produce and what we can do to combat our information over-consumption.”
Software complexity
Did you miss the significance buried in the Invensys/Microsoft announcement that I wrote about here? Microsoft is helping Invensys write the code to move some of its software to the Azure cloud.
The significance is that software is complex. It is not easily ported. For years, I talked with executives who said they would integrate software from an acquisition easily because “both are built with .Net; both use object oriented programming; and both use Service Oriented Architecture. However, software is more complicated than that. One person’s objects aren’t necessarily another’s. Same with a services bus. I’ve seen much overpromise and underdeliver. So this approach by Invensys and Microsoft is intriguing.
Special Bonus Thought–Going with the flow
In Yoga, we often talk of going with the flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book on Flow–the psychology of optimal experience. Now, this <a href=”http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail5202.html”<podcast of TechNation with Dr. Moira Gunn, who learns more about the perspective of flows from Duke professor Adrian Bejan, author of Design in Nature. We learn that flow is blessed by the laws of thermodynamics.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 27, 2012 | Software
I’m still working in the manufacturing software area. Here is an interesting announcement recently received from Invensys Operations Management. It announced an alliance with Microsoft Corp. last week for migrating some Invensys applications to the Windows Azure cloud. The alliance expands the company’s continuing relationship with Microsoft and will afford end users cloud-based offerings in the manufacturing and infrastructure operations space. Remember that Wonderware tied its future to Microsoft from its inception–at a time when others were Unix-based and it was not a sure thing that Microsoft would win that war.
“As Microsoft’s Alliance ISV Industry Partner of the Year in 2011, we are excited to enter into this alliance, which further defines our position as a leading provider of automation solutions that help optimize manufacturing business operations in real time,” said Ravi Gopinath, president, Invensys Operations Management’s software business. “Working with Microsoft reinforces the strategic alignment between our two companies, with a mutual goal of using Windows Azure technology to bring leading-edge cloud solutions to the industrial market. By offering cloud-based variants of our existing Historian and business process management solutions, we can help our customers lower costs, reduce systems complexity and cut hardware and software investments, while creating a high-performance environment for more agile operations management.”
Within the alliance, Microsoft will help Invensys accelerate the development of its Wonderware Historian and Workflow applications to enable them to run on the Windows Azure cloud. Initial development activities will extend existing Invensys solutions with managed history and reporting capabilities, as well as business process management on demand.
“Invensys is an example of how Microsoft continues to work with companies that use our platforms to build the solutions their manufacturing customers need to address the critical operating issues they face each and every day,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, corporate vice president, developer and platform evangelism, at Microsoft. “Providing cloud-based reporting and collaboration services allows these customers to pay for what they use, which means they can better scale and manage their technology deployment costs. It’s an attractive model for any customer that has widely distributed operations, limited IT resources or the need to rapidly scale. Customers will have the choice of different usage models, so they pay for only what they need.”
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 26, 2012 | Operations Management
I’ve hardly missed a Wednesday with Frank Deford on NPR for more than 20 years. He’s the best sports analyst and thinker I’ve ever heard. Well, actual confession, I get his weekly essay through iTunes on RSS feed, so I listen when I can.
Last week he tackled the growth problem of NASCAR. I grew up in the time of “shade tree” mechanics. Those were the kids I hung out with. We (well, them mostly, I was pretty small) tuned engines, worked on all sorts of things. Friends reworked Model Ts and Model As. It was the era of “chopped and channeled” classic cars where you dropped in a 409 or 427 engine and Hurst 4-on-the-floor. We were “Chevy” or “Ford” guys.
By the late 70s or 80s, cars were becoming pretty generic. Then with computer controls, you just couldn’t work on cars very much. I even quit changing my own oil in the 90s. That’s when I began to feel that working on the MG Midget was too much work.
Back to NASCAR. Seems they commissioned a study to find out why growth in popularity has stopped. Turns out the kids of the white, good ol’ boys who grew up loving cars just don’t love them. Cars have become an expensive necessity mostly known for the entertainment value of the electronics inside.
I consider manufacturing not a black box, rather a part of a system. Another part of the system is product design and development. Another part is the customer. We’ll probably be manufacturing cars for a long time. But I wonder about the coming changes in both design and manufacture. Perhaps the time is ripe for a big auto revolution?
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 26, 2012 | Events
This Thursday (2 pm EDT, 1 pm CTD, 11 am PDT) I’ll be moderating a Webcast sponsored by Mitsubishi on the “Visible Factory” where they discuss their latest technologies for moving data from the control system to MES and ERP platforms.
Next week I’ll be at the Fiatech conference and catching up again on the work of the Open O&M Initiative–the work being done to define assets such that documentation developed in the engineering phase of a new plant construction project can move through the construction phase to the operations and maintenance phase assuring accuracy and enhancing lifecycle management.
The week after is a user conference where ACP Thin Manager will unveil its latest iteration.
Following that will be the ABB User conference in Houston.
Look for me at one of those and catch up.
