by Gary Mintchell | Feb 28, 2022 | Data Management, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
This data orchestration news from GE Digital highlights a few themes engineers have worked on for a long time. First, if you know how product development works, new products often are born from a customer problem. Check out the quote from the customer below about this product. Also, finding a way to consolidate data from disparate sources and present them in a way that enables decision making has been a holy grail. Many supplier executives have told me they’ve solved it over the years. Here is another advance in that direction.
Summary:
- Digitized solution increases manufacturing throughput by overcoming variations due to supply chain constraints and changing consumer demands
- Allows companies to unify, transform, orchestrate, and manage variances in manufacturing product data across different assets, systems, processes, and plants
- Easily connects disparate manufacturing product data from various sources and transforms it into factory floor friendly information
- Provides audit trail of variances and updates to manufacturing product data for visibility and compliance
GE Digital announced Proficy Orchestration Hub. This new software solution provides out-of-the-box tools to unify manufacturing product information from disparate data systems, transforms and organizes raw business-oriented information into production-ready formats, and orchestrates the information across factory floor systems at a single site or multiple sites.
Accurate product manufacturing data, that is readily available during production execution, decreases waste by about 10% per plant annually from less rework and rejects. It also reduces production delays and compliance issues, leading to approximately 5% improvement in on-time delivery and 1% decrease in compliance-related costs.
“We collaborated with GE Digital on the development of this solution to support improved accuracy and efficiency in identifying and implementing specification changes,” said Kevin Briggs, Architect, IS Operations for The J.M. Smucker Company. “By integrating systems and digitizing operational product data management, we can create greater flexibility in manufacturing environments, reduce waste and costs, ensure consistent quality and compliance and increase production throughput.”
With supply chain issues, more products and/or regulatory standards, production can get out of sync with the latest manufacturing product data, resulting in lower quality, increased waste, and operations headaches. Proficy Orchestration Hub records and allows users to analyze the updates to manufacturing product data at a given plant. It also stores deviations and comments, recorded as variances, to provide visibility into a plant’s adoption of the changes. This allows manufacturers to decrease quality variability due to ad-hoc modifications as well as the non-productive time and manual efforts trying to execute standard production work.
Companies have been struggling with various manufacturing product data orchestration issues such as spreadsheets with tens of tabs and thousands of rows, paper records that can be inconsistent and overwhelming, and multiple recipe changes that have to be coordinated across production lines. The “new normal” with its supply chain issues has acerbated these traditional challenges as companies are forced to modify recipes to work around shortages.
“Proficy Orchestration Hub helps manufacturers solve common challenges such as inefficiencies in production due to inaccurate product data, siloed and custom approaches to product data, compliance risks, and lack of quality standardization,” said Richard Kenedi, General Manager of GE Digital’s Manufacturing and Digital Plant business. “For companies that are tired of cobbling together plant systems or manually trying to capture the right product manufacturing data on paper, this solution can help increase throughput, reduce waste, and improve quality with manufacturing product data management at their fingertips.”
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 25, 2022 | Business, Commentary, News
Several companies have internal incubators or other programs to foster innovation from outside the company. Hexagon has been pursuing one method of innovation—acquisitions. But it also has an “open innovation start-up platform” called Sixth Sense targeted to “accelerate technology commercialisation in global manufacturing industry.”
Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division launched Sixth Sense to bring together start-ups and industry-leading companies to create transformative solutions that benefit everyone. It promotes sharing resources, data and ideas to fast-track progress and solve real-world problems which address some of humanity’s greatest challenges, such as the journey to net zero. The challenge areas include Sustainability, Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Sensors and Robotics.
Sixth Sense’s first themed challenge – Artificial Intelligence (AI) for sustainable Smart Manufacturing – encompasses all these areas and is also accepting dedicated applications, with start-ups encouraged to register their interest for future themed challenges and events.
Parth Joshi, Chief Product and Technology Officer of Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division, said: “We are searching for intelligent, efficient solutions that will not only enhance performance, but benefit people and the planet. Industry 4.0 is evolving and pushing to solve complex challenges, but the catch is that you cannot solve big problems without solving lots of little ones at each step with innovation.”
The 10 most innovative proposals will be chosen for an intensive innovate-on-the-job scaling programme, supported by Hexagon, key clients and world-leading mentors. Three final concepts will be offered opportunities to globalise and scale their business as commercial joint ventures.
Milan Kocić, Head of Sixth Sense for Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division, said: “Sixth Sense will build a bridge between small businesses and larger manufacturers; helping overcome start-ups’ challenges with scaling, while simultaneously meeting the industry’s need for new ideas.”
The platform has already partnered with a number of promising young companies, and is founded on the principle that diversity is fundamental to innovation and establishing such a thriving open ecosystem.
The selection criteria for Sixth Sense include:
• $1m or less in revenue
• 1-5 years in existence
• Post seed, Series A, Series A+
• Proven traction and product-market fit
• Propensity to scale
Preferred qualities:
• Validation of investment from third party
• IP & licenses
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 25, 2022 | Automation, Enterprise IT, Internet of Things, Operations Management, Wireless
Stacey Higgenbotham writes in her weekly Stacey on IoT newsletter about the proliferation of IoT networks. I’ve been noting advances in 5G and WiFi6 and occasionally about advances in Bluetooth, but she puts it all together here.
But as we have added more devices and more types of networks, wireless connectivity has become a lot more complicated. We have personal area networks for wearables and headsets that use Bluetooth. We have some devices on Wi-Fi 5 networks and others on Wi-Fi 6 or even Wi-Fi 6E. Smart homes might have Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Thread. Corporate offices might have a proprietary OT network and variations on 4G or 5G cellular.
Then it comes to the crucial point.
And someone has to manage all of this. Welcome to the end of the general purpose wireless network. Today, it’s all about special purpose connectivity.
On the one hand, corporate IT must pick up new skills.
So how will corporate IT departments manage the provisioning and acquisition of connectivity across multiple types of networks? Wi-Fi gear that handles Wi-Fi and Bluetooth that gets managed by the IT department has already come onto the market. But while the IT department might help manage the cellular network bills, with private LTE or private 5G it’s unclear how that gear and management will converge.
And, of course, changes also mean new opportunities for entrepreneurs to enter.
As general purpose wireless networks fade, enterprises will need help. The only question is: Who will win the race to provide it?
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 24, 2022 | Business, News
I mentioned in my previous post about changes in the types of news coming my way. That was a LiDAR sensor. I recently talked with Max Kissel, co-founder and managing director of Soley, a German university spinoff dealing with managing complexity of product portfolios. The company applies advanced math and complexity management to sort through the complexity of products and component parts a company may have accumulated over many years.
He told me about the solution. Soley has three solutions: Enterprise Digital Twin—graph of BOM, supply chain, etc., updated regularly; Complexity Patterns, we created PhD program, not just analytic solution; Transformational Decision Support—helps with decision making for customer teams. This is a map—nodes and edges, like a mind map—that is a semantic network, would be millions of nodes hosted on Azure. It maps customers, products, components, suppliers.
Decisions in the product portfolio have a significant impact on sales, delivery capability, working capital and the outcomes
Millions of dependencies between products, value stream, customers and suppliers make fast and targeted interventions extremely time-consuming and costly
Soley provides automated evaluation bases and digitized decision-making processes, thus freeing up valuable time and design freedom
Enterprise Digital Twin brings together all relevant information and dependencies of a company.
Complexity Patterns uncover the most important fields of action and set the focus for all stakeholders.
Transformational Decision Support brings all the important facts and stakeholders together at one table.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 24, 2022 | Automation, Sensors
The types of news releases and calls I’ve received over the past few years have signaled a shift in technology and applications. Sensor news was sparse, now new generations with new applications have emerged. Take this news of a software-defined LiDAR for autonomous vehicles. Think not only cars on the highway, but think also of autonomous material handling vehicles in our factories and warehouses.
PreAct Technologies, an Oregon-based developer of near-field flash LiDAR technology, announced that its patent pending T30P flash LiDAR is the industry’s first sensor designed to be software-definable and integrate easily into a complete autonomous driving system stack for automakers, as well as trucking and robotics applications. Vehicles with software-defined architectures require sensor technology that can support over-the-air updates throughout the life of the vehicle, allowing OEMs to generate ongoing revenue by offering powerful new features and functionality.
“We are excited to bring our software-definable flash LiDAR to market, furthering the advancement of autonomous mobility across multiple industries,” said Paul Drysch, CEO of PreAct Technologies. “We’ve spent the last three years creating a solution that fulfills the need of software-defined vehicles, providing the most value for Tier 1s and OEMs over the long term by making any ADAS application relevant for the entire life of the vehicle.”
As nearly every OEM is integrating high-performance computing into their vehicle and planning for the future, PreAct is committed to working with carmakers on future-proofing vehicles by delivering more sophisticated ADAS and safety applications throughout the life of a vehicle. PreAct’s flash LiDAR architecture is based on modulated waveforms that can be optimized for different applications via over-the-air updates, along with an application stack that resides on the edge. The flexibility of a software defined LiDAR allows Tier 1 suppliers and OEMs to package one sensor for multiple use cases – everything from true curb detection and gesture recognition to self-parking and automatic door actuation – that can update to meet their changing needs as more user and sensor data become available.
T30P, with a frame rate of 200 fps and QVGA resolution, is also the fastest flash Lidar on the market making it well suited for ground and air robotics or industrial applications – systems which all share a need for fast, accurate and high-resolution sensors that can reliably define and track objects in all environmental conditions.
PreAct’s T30P Flash LiDAR sensor suite will be available in July 2022.
