In this new world of the Industrial Internet of Things, is ProfiNet still relevant as an industrial network (fieldbus)? Is there a future for ProfiNet?
These were the questions I had heading into Phoenix and the 22nd annual meeting of PI North America. And I received answers.
Karsten Schneider, director of Profibus International, gave the technology update keynote and raised several interesting points.
More nodes of ProfiNet were sold in 2015 than were nodes of Profibus. This is the anticipated crossover point where Ethernet is becoming the dominant bus as well as network. Further, cooperation between PI and the Fieldcomm organization (combination of HART Communication Foundation and Fieldbus Foundation) has proceeded with agreement between FDI and EDDL. Further cooperation was obvious by the presence of a representative of the CLPA (CC-Link Partners Association). CLPA and PI have signed a memorandum of understanding to develop a standard method of communicating from one bus to the other.
Remember the “fieldbus wars”? Well, “times change.”
Time Sensitive Networking
Many application areas beyond industrial seriously need higher speed, determinism, real-time in their networks. Think of the growth of video streaming in real time, for example. Therefore the IEEE has been working on a new standard–Time Sensitive Networking or TSN.The standard is being built on IEEE 802.1. Many tremendous benefits will follow.
Think on this tidbit. When adopted as a standard, it will likely be build into commercial Ethernet chips. With a large number of industries wanting this technology, the number of TSN-enabled commercially available Ethernet chips will be huge. With huge commercial market potential, the price will drop. TSN Ethernet chips will be readily available and affordable for industrial devices. This will also likely replace Profinet IRT in the future (but not for a few years).
Take note that this will be a generally available and used chipset. It will primarily be IT oriented, but used also by OT. Perhaps this is the technology that brings the two together?
Future Work
A wide-ranging panel discussion sparked the creative juices of the group. One topic became the future engineer. We’ve had mechanical engineers, control engineers, data (software) engineers. Panelists expect that in the not-very-distant future, engineers will be multi-disciplinary.
I’ve maintained for several years that control and automation engineers must become network engineers–at least to a certain level. It is becoming even more important that they know something about SQL, programming in languages such as C, C++, Java, Python, and in scripting languages. Depending upon what sort of industry within manufacturing/production they should also be familiar with mechatronics or processes, too.
Is there a future for ProfiNet? Yes, but it will look only slightly like the present.
“I am still learning” wrote Michelangelo at age 87. That’s one of my goals in life.
Seth Godin ran across this idea from the other direction. He wrote this week in Fully Baked:
In medical school, an ongoing lesson is that there will be ongoing lessons. You’re never done. Surgeons and internists are expected to keep studying for their entire career—in fact, it’s required to keep a license valid.
Knowledge workers, though, the people who manage, who go to meetings, who market, who do accounting, who seek to change things around them—knowledge workers often act as if they’re fully baked, that more training and learning is not just unnecessary but a distraction.
The average knowledge worker reads fewer than one business book a year.
On the other hand, the above-average knowledge worker probably reads ten.
Show me your bookshelf, or the courses you take, or the questions you ask, and I’ll have a hint as to how much you care about leveling up.
Where Do You Get Information?
I wrote yesterday’s post about getting information spurred by the thoughts of Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information. This is a Silicon Valley technology news site that is funded by subscriptions. No advertising. No worrying about pressure from advertisers to write something nice about them.
She recently wrote about the recent trend toward company CEOs or CTOs writing a piece, say on Medium, and then sending links and a quote to a few “trusted” sources in the media. She was seeing these stories picked up and passed along verbatim. No analysis or value add.
That is just what the PR people were hoping. How do they get their message out unfiltered. I’ve been advising marketing people along this path for years.
I knew a guy in my business similar to me who would just copy the press release and call it an article.
I have no problem learning about new products and solutions and technologies in the market from the source. Note: You do have to wade through an awful lot of hype and superlative words to get to the news. I don’t advise that, but marketing people seem to have no confidence in what they are peddling, so they resort to verbal overkill.
But when you go to a magazine or other source (like mine), you surely expect some perspective and analysis.
Where do you go to get this information? What do you trust?
Speaking of information
This piece in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Why Learning is Central to Sustained Innovation, seems to fit in with these thoughts. How do you create a learning environment for your people development culture?
Many managers think they can create better products just by improving the development process or adding new tools. But it’s skilled people, not processes, that create great products.
The authors, Michael Balle’, James Morgan, and Durward K. Sobek II, note, “We frequently visit companies where managers say they want to improve their product development capability. they want to learn how learn principles and practices can improve their ability to innovate while reducing costs and improving quality. When we inquire about their approach to human resource development, we often hear, as one vice president of product development recently told us, that ‘of course, people are our most important asset. Se we recruit and hire the top people from the best universities and get out of their way.’
However, the only things many companies actually do under the heading of people development is to have an annual training-hours target and a travel budget for sending employees to conferences. If managers really thought that people were their greatest asset and that it’s the energy and creativity of employees that drives innovation, why do companies do so little? Why doesn’t growing and developing people excite them just as much as installing new additive manufacturing equipment or the latest cloud-based collaboration tool?”
It takes leadership concerned with a learning culture, beginning with the leaders. Are they always learning? Reminds me of James Truchard, founder of National Instruments. He had such tremendous curiosity. He passed that along to the organization in many ways. Everyone wanted to be like that.
Is a culture of entitlement contributing to the workforce skills gap?
There has been a lot of discussion of the entitlement mentality of today’s young people as they leave college and expect that they are owed a well-paying job starting somewhere near the top. On today’s news, there was a discussion about some interns who decided that they were entitled to a work environment that operated the way they wanted it to, and they proceeded to challenge the employer’s policies (yes, the same employer that was kind enough to give them their first work experience). They were summarily fired. I was recently asked by a parent to provide some guidance to a son who had received a mechanical engineering degree, but had no job. I suggested that he consider companies such as packaging machinery manufacturers or packagers – not only because they are hiring mechanical engineers, but because they offer exciting careers. But after a few minutes of speaking with him, I learned that he knew more about how the engineering workplace operated than I did (after 30 years), and he felt entitled to wait till some job came around that suited his vision of engineering.
Less often discussed is the entitlement mentality of employers. I see employers also acting as though they are entitled to the workers that they want, when they want them and with the skills that they need. There was a day when there were multiple qualified applicants for each open manufacturing job. Employers had to use various screening mechanisms to pick from among the qualified. But those days seem to be behind us. Automation has raised the bar for entry level employment while high schools have arguably lowered the bar for graduation and reduced the diversity of programs, driven in large part by increasing state and national control. The gap between the unemployed and unfilled manufacturing jobs is growing wider.
I’m currently sitting in a conference session. A speaker mentioned about Millennials and their work ethic. Sounded like Campbell above. I think that is a misplaced thought and terrible generalization. Remember when we talked about Gen X and the “slacker” mentality? I’m in a room about evenly divided with Boomers and GenXers. The GenX guys and gals are doing some really good engineering. But I remember when many of them asked how many months it would take before they would be CEO. Sounds more like the exuberance of youth than a generation thing.
The question remains. How do you keep learning? Where do you get information? How are you helping others learn?
I like the push notices of email to tell me that there is new information posted somewhere. But the last email telling me about Tim Sowell’s latest post was sad. He’s stopping his run of thought leadership (truly) pieces at Operations Evolution. Sowell is a Schneider Electric Fellow and VP of System Strategy at Schneider Electric in the Common Architecture team in R&D.
This post will be my final one in this blog, as forum does not seem to be working as it once did, and we exploring new approaches to getting thought leadership out. Thank you for your interest if you feel like we should continue in some form, please post a comment.
Here’s his lead paragraph. Discover the rest of his thinking on the site.
In today’s “flat world” of demand-driven supply, the need for agility is only going to move faster in the next 10 years. This is driving leading companies to transform their operational landscape in systems, assets and culture in a shift to “smart work.” Agility transforms their thinking from a process-centric to a product and production focus, which requires a dynamic, agile work environment between assets/machines, applications and people. Aligned decisions and actions across a multi-site product value/supply chain is crucial, and requires the ongoing push of a combination of automated (embedded) wisdom and augmented Intelligence (human wisdom).
Manufacturing / production companies have accumulated tremendous amounts of data over the past decades. Mostly they do nothing with that data. People like Sowell and Stan DeVries have been making sense of all the applications that can help customers succeed in this new technological reality of actually using the data well.
Media thoughts
It’s hard work maintaining a blog–especially when it’s not your main job. I know. I’ve done this for 13 years.
But the problem for thinkers and companies is–how do you get your information out?
It used to be you could use trade press. But shrinking ad budgets and demand for shorter pieces on the Web (at least that is current thinking in many places) have changed the way companies are relating to traditional publications. If you want to get out your whole message, you need to write it yourself. With the Web and search, you can write it and then try to get links.
I’ve linked to most of Sowell’s posts. Obviously not enough of you have clicked and gone to the site. On the other hand, I think there are inflated ideas of the amount of readers. A typical magazine Website in our industry may get upwards of 75,000 views a month. Or a couple may approach 100,000. Certainly not the millions that get publicized in the general technology press.
But if you drill down, a typical article may only get a few hundred views.
The way my site is constructed, when you visit you see several posts. I’m not really selling “eyeballs”. But depending upon the tool you consult, there are several thousand who at least see the headline if you don’t actually read it all. Since my site has few distractions–just a couple of ads and a few other pieces of information–the writing is emphasized.
So, I don’t know Sowell’s traffic (he’s on Blogspot, not the best platform) and I don’t know Schneider’s expectations. But the traffic was not sufficient.
The other company blogs I follow are informative, but they have changed over time to less blog and more PR-type writing. This one was different. I’ll miss the weekly read.
In this podcast, also viewable in video, I discuss the 2016 Ignition Customer Conference from Inductive Automation–and the pseudo competition between OPC UA and MQTT/Sparkplug. Mostly it’s all about getting the right information into your Industrial Software (HMI/SCADA) application.
It was interesting that spokespeople for the two communication technologies were at the same venue. There was an undercurrent of competition, although many seemed to think there was a place for each.
Also available as a podcast download or on iTunes, Amazon and other outlets.
