by Gary Mintchell | Apr 6, 2021 | Operations Management, Services
The rush to improve bottom lines and build closer relationships to customers through adding a valuable services portfolio has progressed from novel to commonplace. I’ve seen major IT companies pivot to a services-first strategy. This announcement of new services from GE Digital is a nice step forward.
GE Digital announced the availability of new Professional Services offerings. Quick Start for Industrial Advanced Analytics, Quick Start for Proficy Operations Hub, and Quick Start for OEE allow industrial companies to partner with GE Digital to deploy the company’s software with action plans for rapid digital transformation and continuous improvement.
“The market is moving fast, driving our customers to manage more SKUs, shorter production runs and more line change overs. Our solutions can scale from plant to enterprise-wide and then beyond the four-walls, from Plant Operations to Enterprise execution across many industries,” said Richard Kenedi, General Manager of GE Digital’s Manufacturing and Digital Plant business. “This requires accelerated pilot projects based on more than a million deployment hours of experience that provide faster results and a template for global visibility, orchestration, and optimization.”
The Quick Start for Industrial Advanced Analytics enables an industrial organization’s process engineers in AI and machine learning to accelerate problem detection, reduce variability, and optimize equipment and processes so that factors that are impacting process variability are identified quickly. GE Digital’s Professional Services team deploys Proficy CSense and provides a path for root cause analysis, early warning monitoring, predictive and proactive actions, process Digital Twin simulations, and process setpoint control and optimization.
With the Quick Start for Industrial Advanced Analytics, organizations can unlock the hidden potential within data to significantly improve operations in a way that simple trending or traditional analytics cannot. GE Digital’s Professional Services team develops behavioral models to identify abnormal conditions that might indicate problems such as faulty or inefficient uses of assets or systems, causes for variation in production rate or quality based on external factors or equipment, or root causes that could be resolved using advanced process control. Modelling the behavior of existing processes can enable new awareness and drive predictive behaviors for improvement in quality, maintenance, and production planning.
The Quick Start for Proficy Operations Hub helps industrial organizations to not only modernize their UI but also to merge data coming from different systems related to production KPIs, environmental health and safety, maintenance, and more. Teams across all levels in an organization can visualize their processes and make better decisions based on real-time and historical plant-wide application data, including historian, MES, and third-party solutions.
With the Quick Start for Proficy Operations Hub, users can monitor, control, provide data entry, and perform analysis all through Proficy Operations Hub using a desktop, laptop, or any mobile device. The Quick Start service provides a path for modernizing visualization and transitioning reports and dashboards to a thin client based on the latest Web-based UI interactions. With this Quick Start, companies can economically transition to a modern front-end without back-end or production changes, as part of a critical step toward digital transformation.
The Quick Start for OEE allows plant production managers, shift leaders, and line operators to rapidly deploy a targeted MES solution for one production line and measure benefit realization in weeks. OEE, a widely acknowledged best practice KPI, measures manufacturing productivity according to three standard perspectives: Quality (good production), Performance (fast production), and Availability (no downtime). Manufacturing teams can increase the effectiveness of their continuous improvement approach through the application of OEE via automatic data collection from automation systems, scaling by first focusing on a pilot line to quickly assess benefit realization, followed by defining a path to full enterprise visibility. This Quick Start helps manufacturers track losses with real-time integration, perform root-cause analysis, and solve the most impactful issues by identifying and implementing countermeasures.
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 5, 2021 | Automation, News, Process Control, Sensors
ABB has moved its media relations, at least the people working with me, to England. Two other major European industrial technology providers also have moved marketing and media relations from the US to England. I have no idea whether this is a statement about the state of the US market or the state of their cost structure. Maybe both.
ABB changed CEOs several years ago and just changed again. These precipitated changes in corporate emphases—divesting several large businesses and adding others. The variety in these three announcements certainly reflects the new diversity of the corporate portfolio.
ABB drone-based leak detection and greenhouse gas measuring system
HoverGuard can help operators of USA’s three million miles of pipeline infrastructure to increase their safety and environmental capabilities in line with the USA 2020 PIPES Act.
According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the majority of gas shipments in the US take place using the millions of miles of the nation’s pipeline infrastructure. On December 27, 2020, the Protecting Our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety (PIPES) Act was signed into law in the United States. The Act directs gas pipeline operators to use advanced leak detection technologies to protect the environment and pipeline safety.
Detection of odorless and invisible gas leaks can be challenging and expensive. ABB’s latest addition to its ABB Ability Mobile Gas Leak Detection System, HoverGuard, provides the solution by finding leaks faster and more reliably than ever before.
HoverGuard is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based system that detects, quantifies and maps leaks up to 300 ft from natural gas distribution and transmission pipelines, gathering lines, storage facilities, and other potential sources quickly, safely and reliably. It automatically generates comprehensive digital reports that summarize results and can be shared in minutes after a survey.
The cloud-connected, multi-gas solution is also the first of its kind to quantify the three most important greenhouse gases methane, carbon dioxide and water vapor continuously while flying. Each greenhouse gas affects the environment differently and is present in the air in different amounts. Sourcing individual gases also provides important information to scientists and researchers when studying the complex environmental processes affecting climate and pollution.
Patented cavity enhanced laser absorption spectroscopy detects methane with a sensitivity more than 1,000 times higher than conventional leak detection tools. This sensitivity and speed allow HoverGuard to detect leaks while flying at altitudes of 130 ft, or higher, and at speeds greater than 55 mph. It can cover 10-15 times more land area per minute by operating on low-cost commercial UAV capable of carrying a payload of 6.6 lbs.
ABB calls for more collaboration with OEMs
ABB has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Hitachi Construction Machinery to share their expertise and collaborate in bringing solutions to market that will reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with heavy machinery in mining.
The companies will explore possibilities to apply ABB’s electrification, automation, and digital solutions to mining trucks and excavators provided by Hitachi Construction Machinery as part of wider efforts with mine operators to electrify all processes from pit to port. Original equipment manufacturer (OEM) Hitachi Construction Machinery also brings expertise in driverless operation and labor-saving technologies. The aim of the combined solutions is to enhance the efficiency and flexibility of customer businesses, contributing to the reduction of CO₂ and the realization of a sustainable society.
The collaboration with Hitachi Construction Machinery is one of many that ABB are looking to develop with OEMs to accelerate the transition to all-electric mines.
“ABB is calling for more collaboration between OEMs and technology companies to fast-track the development of new emissions-reducing systems with electrification and automation of the whole mining operation the goal. We are ready to work more with OEMs to establish a common approach for the market, and through strategic collaboration provide solutions that can help enable a low-carbon society and make mining operations more responsible,” said Joachim Braun, Division President, Process Industries, ABB. “New emissions-reducing technologies can transform the energy-intensive mining industry to achieve an even more productive, but also sustainable future.”
“Today, the challenge of our customers is on electrification of trucks and the time to change is now. But nobody can achieve this transformation alone. Co-creation of solutions with OEMs and mining companies is needed to successfully integrate electrification in mines.” said Max Luedtke, ABB’s Global Head of Mining.
ABB Ability Performance Optimization Service for cold rolling mills
ABB has launched its new ABB Ability Performance Optimization Service for cold rolling mills, offering steel, aluminum, and other metals manufacturers opportunities to reach new levels of operational performance through technology, boosting their processes and profitability.
The new service – part of ABB’s metals digital portfolio and Collaborative Operations for Metals suite – combines continuous performance monitoring using ABB Ability Data Analytics for cold rolling mills, with real time support from ABB experts. ABB will work alongside customers with the vision of continuing to transform the metals industry.
The data analytics component uses process-specific algorithms based on a century of metals domain expertise to collect high frequency data from mill control systems and discover trends, benchmarks and other performance factors, sending alerts to operators and maintenance when opportunities to optimize performance are identified.
Alongside this, ABB experts are available to provide onsite or offsite support, recommending actions to ensure the mill maintains its performance targets against key performance indicators (KPIs) for productivity, quality and yield. Leveraging the collective strengths of metals producers and ABB experts, access to dashboards is shared, enabling all parties to drill down to individual coil level.
In addition, ABB experts can provide customers with detailed reports at regular intervals describing areas for improvement, identified trends, or problem areas found in historical data, allowing for continuous improvement over time.
Key benefits include continuous collaboration and access to experts; increased productivity through improved asset performance and reduced downtime; higher yield and quality resulting from immediate corrective action when problems occur; reduced risk of equipment failure; the ability to leverage insights across the enterprise and reductions in wastage, energy and other costs.
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 2, 2021 | News, Organizations
CESMII – the Smart Manufacturing Institute constitutes the USA equivalent of manufacturing initiatives found in Germany, Italy, China, and many other countries. I’m glad to see CEO John Dyck popping up in panels with Industrie 4.0 and other international conferences. We are in a strange geopolitical/business vortex right now where some countries have realized (in the US case—belatedly realized) that manufacturing is strategic for national survival yet businesses (as they have from the beginnings of civilization) have realized that they must engage with international trade for their survival.
While the world’s peoples sort all of this out, rest assured that there exists a US national initiative to promote smart manufacturing. Below is some new information. Perhaps you, too, can submit an RFP.
RFP to Create Industry-Vertical / Technology-Horizontal Smart Manufacturing Innovation Centers
CESMII – the Smart Manufacturing Institute has announced a new Request for Proposals (RFP) to expand the network of Smart Manufacturing Innovation Centers (“SMICs”). These are a collection of visible, credible, high value, regional extensions of CESMII. Each SMIC works as a partner organization with CESMII, with strong industry engagement and core competencies related to a key industry vertical (i.e., steel, automotive, chemical processing, discrete manufacturing, etc.) and/or a technology horizontal (i.e., artificial intelligence and machine learning, new sensing and wireless data communications, process control algorithms and predictive models, etc.).
Through this RFP, CESMII seeks to strategically expand its SMIC network through the addition of new SMIC partner organizations. These new SMIC organizations will benefit from their CESMII partnership in many ways:
- Increased national and global leadership as a Smart Manufacturing Innovation Center.
- Expanded portfolio and capabilities with access to industry-leading Smart Manufacturing (SM)
technology, knowledge and thought leadership.
- CESMII-funded SMIC operating budget to implement SM technologies around existing assets.
- CESMII-provided SMIC Operating Kit to increase the return on investment of industry
engagements and deepen the exposure to the manufacturing ecosystem.
- A dedicated instance of the SM Innovation Platform (SMIP) and relevant software applications to showcase the SMIC organization’s manufacturing assets and competencies and demonstrate its integration with SMIC manufacturing assets to create testbeds. This will further increase the SMIC’s visibility and engagement with industry.
- Potential to host membership Application Projects (self-funded) and lead working groups aligned to SMIC’s capabilities.
- Additional opportunities for publication, promotion, and outreach.
- Expanded Education and Workforce Development and membership-engagement opportunities.
“Smart Manufacturing Innovation Centers are one of several strategic initiatives to highlight the state-of- the-art in SM’s impact on energy productivity, quality, throughput, costs/profitability, safety, and asset reliability, in manufacturing environments,” explained John Dyck, CEO of CESMII. “CESMII is excited to establish this ecosystem to exemplify and espouse the characteristics, capabilities and behaviors consistent with the 4th Industrial Revolution. We are encouraging Universities, Colleges, Vocational Schools and industry Centers of Excellence to apply for our SMIC funding and become part of this exciting new ecosystem.”
Up to $1M in federal funding is being made available through this RFP. Selected SMIC candidates will need to provide matching funds to bring the total RFP value up to $2M. CESMII anticipates selecting 3 to 10 SMIC candidates with a performance period of 16 months.
CESMII is the United States’ national institute on Smart Manufacturing, driving cultural and technological transformation and secure industrial technologies as national imperatives. By enabling frictionless movement of information – raw and contextualized data – between real-time Operations and the people and systems that create value in and across Manufacturing organizations, CESMII is ensuring the power of information and innovation is at the fingertips of everyone who touches manufacturing.
Founded in 2016, in partnership with Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), CESMII is the third institute funded by EERE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office. The Institute is accelerating Smart Manufacturing (SM) adoption through the integration of advanced sensors, data (ingestion – contextualization – modeling – analytics), platforms and controls to radically impact manufacturing performance, through measurable improvements in areas such as: quality, throughput, costs/profitability, safety, asset reliability and energy productivity. CESMII’s program and administrative home is with the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 1, 2021 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, News
ZEDEDA has been in the news here before. I also participated in a day-long conference with the company and many guests. The company has been making a splash with open-source and edge orchestration. Funding news, while exciting to the company, is not always that interesting to me. What I find intriguing here is that one of the investors is Rockwell Automation. That company has been making some forays outside its longtime control business. This will be fun to watch.
- Oversubscribed round includes new strategic investors Rockwell Automation, Juniper Networks and EDF North America Ventures, along with existing investors Almaz Capital, Energize Ventures, Lux Capital and HBAM
- New capital will accelerate investments in R&D, sales, and marketing
- ZEDEDA expects to more than triple the number of customer edge nodes under management by mid-2021
ZEDEDA announced a $12.5 million highly oversubscribed expansion to its $16 million Series A round initially closed in February 2019, bringing its total funding to-date to $28.5 million.
The latest round of institutional funding validates the traction ZEDEDA has achieved across the market as customers adopt its disruptive orchestration solution for the distributed edge. ZEDEDA will use the new influx of capital to continue to scale its operations, including investments in R&D, sales and marketing.
New strategic investors Rockwell Automation, Juniper Networks and EDF North America Ventures (a wholly owned subsidiary of EDF Trading North America) recognize the market opportunity of edge computing and ZEDEDA’s opportunity as the first in the industry to solve the unique challenges of deploying, managing and securing hardware and applications at the distributed edge on-premises, near-premises and in the field. Existing investors participating in the round included Almaz Capital, Energize Ventures, Lux Capital and HBAM.
Operationalizing Secure Distributed Edge Computing at Scale
With the edge computing market expected to more than quadruple over the next four years, enterprises realize that their strategic vision must implement an open foundation that enables visibility, control and security for their edge projects at scale. Companies can achieve those strategic imperatives only by leveraging an as-a-service model, which takes advantage of a recurring software subscription and enables enterprises with a cloud-native architecture at the edge that scales on demand while supporting legacy investments.
ZEDEDA’s cloud-based orchestration solution, sold and consumed itself entirely as-a-service, enables complete flexibility for end users, OEMs, machine builders, technology providers and system integrators, with support for any hardware, any application and any cloud or on-premises system. The company expects to more than triple the number of customer edge nodes under management by mid-2021 from today.
“Our new strategic investors, as well as the existing investors who joined in again, bring years of experience in our core industries of manufacturing, oil and gas, energy, telco and retail,” said ZEDEDA founder and CEO Said Ouissal. “Their investment is a validation of our progress, but it also means we have the opportunity to meet the needs of any company who needs to orchestrate applications and hardware outside of traditional data centers.”
Investor Perspectives on $12.5M Strategic Institutional Funding Round
“We see investment in software development to be a key opportunity for driving future growth, including accelerating our Software-as-a-Service opportunities,” said Brian Shepherd, Senior Vice President, Software & Control at Rockwell Automation. “With its focus on providing a flexible edge architecture that meets the needs of existing industrial customers while providing them a path to modernization, as well as enabling new customers seeking to leverage more agile, cloud-native technologies, ZEDEDA’s as-a-service solution fits naturally into our overall strategy.”
“With our commitment to building a net-zero energy future, we believe it’s critical to enable energy providers to optimize operations, maximizing efficiency and output,” said Mary Ann Brelinksky, President, EDF Energy North America. “IoT and edge computing are instrumental in driving these efforts, and ZEDEDA provides the perfect computing foundation that will scale for the future, enabling our customers to implement new technologies that will analyze and respond in real time to their operations.”
“At Juniper, we see the AI-driven enterprise as an important strategic opportunity in the market to enable businesses to extract and utilize previously unrecognized value from existing and new sources of data,” said Kevin Hutchins, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, Juniper Networks. “ZEDEDA operationalizes distributed edge computing, making it possible to implement and manage the entire process, from hardware to applications, in a secure and scalable manner.”
“As one of ZEDEDA’s early investors, we have been excited to see the company’s execution of its vision,” said Geoffrey Baehr, General Partner, Almaz Capital. “The market size of the edge computing market, combined with ZEDEDA’s ability to realize its vision into a generally available solution of strategic importance to its Fortune 500 companies, makes this the right time to significantly increase our investment in the company.”
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 31, 2021 | Internet of Things, Operations Management
Many people remain confused about just what an Internet of Things (IoT) project consists of. Various analysts predict astronomical numbers for potential connected things. We know that a large industrial facility could have thousands, or indeed hundreds of thousands, of sensors and other data points. Testing the performance and resilience of such a network can be both daunting and critical. HiveMQ claims a solution with a platform built upon MQTT.
HiveMQ Swarm Complements HiveMQ MQTT Platform to Deliver a Complete Solution for Enterprises Deploying Large-Scale IoT Solutions
HiveMQ announced HiveMQ Swarm, the industry’s first solution that enables organizations of all sizes to reliably simulate and test large-scale IoT networks. HiveMQ Swam enables enterprises to easily test the scalability and performance of their IoT deployments, resulting in significantly increased quality and reliability of their system. HiveMQ Swarm is also the first solution that provides global enterprises with a superior solution to forecast capacity, infrastructure, and financial cost planning prior to putting their IoT system into production.
“As IoT solutions continue to grow in both scope and volume, the ability to test IoT solutions for scale and performance becomes mission-critical,” said Dominik Obermaier, CTO and founder of HiveMQ. “We have extensive experience with some of the largest IoT systems in the world. These customers have asked us to help them validate their systems before going into production. Swarm meets these needs by enabling our enterprise customers to ensure their large-scale IoT systems perform to expectation the first time they’re deployed.”
IoT systems are incredibly difficult to test prior to production. Emulating behavior in a production environment is often unreliable and individual IoT devices can demonstrate multiple complex behavior patterns. For example, autonomous vehicles at rest behave very differently than those navigating the unexpected events they encounter in the real world, be it a highway or a factory floor.
Despite these challenges, load and stress testing is an unavoidable reality, as fixing IoT production errors in the field can be incredibly expensive, not to mention that these errors can have potentially catastrophic results on the system itself. As a result, determining system resilience is a mission critical endeavor.
HiveMQ Swarm was designed specifically to solve these challenges. Swarm is a distributed platform able to create hundreds of millions of unique network connections that simulate devices, messages, and MQTT topics (a form of addressing that allows MQTT clients to share information), as well as develop reusable scenarios that emulate device behaviors. In addition to a custom data generator to create complex use cases for testing, HiveMQ Swarm is designed to seamlessly integrate with enterprise cloud infrastructure, including public clouds (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and Kubernetes-based systems.
HiveMQ Swarm is complementary to the HiveMQ MQTT platform, an MQTT broker messaging platform designed for the fast, efficient and reliable movement of data to and from connected IoT devices. It uses the MQTT protocol for instant, bi-directional push of data between devices and enterprise systems.
