Industrial IoT Analytics Framework Technical Report

Industrial IoT Analytics Framework Technical Report

Just when I was saying last week that the The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) had been very busy, I interviewed Eric and Wael about this newly published the IIC Industrial IoT Analytics Framework Technical Report (IIAF). It is the first IoT-industry technical document to include a complete set of instructions that IIoT system architects and business leaders can use to deploy industrial analytics systems in their organizations.

People I talked with used to think that the Industrial Internet of Things was all about sensors, or the Internet, or Things. Actually, it is nothing without databases and analytics. And here is the IIC to provide a framework for systems architects.

From the news release:

IDC has predicted that by 2020 one tenth of the world’s data will be produced by machines. Yet without an analytics blueprint, that data could sit unused, never being analyzed and turned into useful insights.  The IIAF is a first-of-its-kind blueprint for system architects and designers to map analytics to the IIoT applications they are supporting, to ensure that business leaders can realize the potential of analytics to enable more-informed decision making.

“Using analytics to provide insights is the holy grail of industrial IoT,” said Wael William Diab, IIC Industrial Analytics Task Group Chair, IIC Steering Committee Member and Senior Director at Huawei. “The IIC IIAF takes a holistic approach by developing the foundational principles of industrial analytics as well as looking at the complete picture from design considerations to creation of business value and functionality. This entire ecosystem approach is valuable to both business leaders as well as technologists, engineers and architects looking to deploy IIoT systems.”

The IIC IIAF is the first document to offer a broad scope of requirements and concerns for industrial analytics applied to IIoT systems. It shows IIoT system architects the steps involved in developing analytics for IIoT systems with state-of-the-art information, including definitions and information flows that shows how the technologies can be applied to the applications. Guidance is provided how and where to deploy industrial analytics based on the characteristics of the applications and outcome expectations.  In addition, the IIAF looks at emerging technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, which are expected to play an increasingly important role in industrial analytics.

“Industrial Analytics is changing rapidly, from data lake to stream processing and machine learning. Our framework provides a common understanding and encourages interoperability across the IIoT ecosystem,” said K. Eric Harper, IIC Industrial Analytics Task Group Chair, IIC Steering Committee Member and Senior Principal Scientist at ABB. “With this foundation, it is more likely that applications will be able to adopt new technologies and techniques in the future without substantial rework.”

Analytics have been applied to other many other fields such as finance and retail to improve the customer experience and increase corporate revenue. The major differentiation in industrial settings is the physicality of the systems. For example, if IIoT systems are not configured correctly, or if their maintenance schedule is wrong, the systems can cause physical harm. Analysis and improvement of operational maintenance across multiple systems must be performed with extreme diligence, and are as important to technology leaders as they are to business leaders looking to increase profits.

“Industrial analytics are the engine that takes data from industrial systems and creates value and insight to get business results,” said Will Sobel, IIC Industrial Analytics Task Group Chair and Chief Strategy Officer at VIMANA. “The sophistication of analytical methods in other domains, such as finance and media, have been evolving at a breakneck pace, but little has been done to apply these techniques to industrial systems. The IIAF provides the special considerations one needs to consider before one uses these technologies in an industrial system.”

When analytics are applied to machine and process data, they help optimize decision-making and enable intelligent operations. These new insights and intelligence can be applied across all levels of any enterprise in any industry if the appropriate data can be collected, curated and analytics are applied correctly.

“In transforming machine raw data into actionable information, industrial analytics plays a crucial role in the industrial Internet just like refineries that turns crude oil into high energy fuel. The actionable information from the analytics is the fuel that drives the optimization of industrial operations and production, the creation of new revenue streams and the enablement of new business models,” said Shi-wan Lin, IIC Technology Working Group Chair and CEO and Co-Founder, Thingswise, LLC.

The full IIC Industrial IoT Analytics Framework Technical Report and list of IIC members who contributed can be found on the IIC website.

Industrial IoT Analytics Framework Technical Report

OSIsoft Announces SoftBank Investment To Fund Internet of Things Infrastructure Growth

OSIsoft LLC, which now self-identifies as a leader in operational intelligence, has announced that SoftBank Group (“SoftBank”) has acquired a significant minority equity interest in the company.

The company is mostly known for its data historian, PI, which is used throughout industry. Over the past few years it has taken on some significant investments evidently in order to fund further growth as data and data analytics command center stage in the Internet of Things ecosystem.

The transaction is part of SoftBank’s strategy to invest in companies laying the foundational infrastructure for the next stage of the Information Revolution. SoftBank believes OSIsoft embodies this strategy, having been a longtime leader in enabling large industries to harness the massive amounts of data generated by their operational technology assets.

As part of the investment, OSIsoft and SoftBank will collaborate on developing new products and services enabling digital transformation and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and strengthening OSIsoft’s presence in new markets.

“We are helping some of the world’s most innovative companies get smarter about how they use their data.  Our industrial customers and utilities demand the highest levels of service and reliability.  That’s why our focus has been, and will always be, on customer success and satisfaction,” said Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy, CEO and founder of OSIsoft. “Collaborating with SoftBank will enable us to bring the concept of data infrastructure to more markets like telecommunications as well as strengthen our commitment to our customers.  We’re very much looking forward to working together.”

“Industrial IoT is a central force in the digitization of the industrial economy.  OSIsoft powers the key underpinnings of this digital transformation.  OSIsoft’s relentless customer focus and masterfully engineered data infrastructure solutions are a direct outcome of Dr. Kennedy’s vision and passion,” said Deep Nishar, Managing Director at SoftBank.  “We are excited to partner with the OSIsoft team to help realize their mission in new markets and customer segments.”

SoftBank purchased the significant minority interest in OSIsoft from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (Kleiner Perkins), TCV and Tola Capital.  Kleiner Perkins and TCV first invested in OSIsoft in 2011 while Tola invested in 2012.  Last year, Mitsui & Co. became an investor in OSIsoft and maintains its ownership stake.

“OSIsoft is one of those rare success stories hiding in plain sight.  The company’s PI System is pervasive across industries: you probably experience the impact of its technology several times a day without realizing it.  OSIsoft has also cultivated an impressive and enthusiastic fan base of loyal customers,” said David Mount, a partner in the Green Growth Fund at Kleiner Perkins.  “This has been a very positive investment for us and we’ve been very proud to be part of the company’s growth.  SoftBank is an ideal partner to bring OSIsoft’s PI System technology to more markets and customers.”

“When we partnered with OSIsoft in 2011, it was already a forerunner in what we now call IIoT, a market that’s expected to reach over $120 billion by 2021,” said Jake Reynolds, General Partner at TCV.  “During our 6-year investment in OSIsoft, we have been amazed at the company’s growing presence and importance in this burgeoning market.  We are pleased that OSIsoft has the opportunity to partner with SoftBank during its next phase in making the world’s industrial infrastructure more connected, efficient, flexible, and sustainable.”

One of the world’s most widely-used technologies for digital transformation, OSIsoft’s PI System captures data from sensors, manufacturing equipment and other devices and transforms it into rich, real-time insights to reduce costs, improve overall productivity and/or create new services. Over 1,000 leading utilities, 95 percent of the largest oil and gas companies and more than 65 percent of the Fortune 500 industrial companies rely on the high-fidelity insights from the PI System to run their businesses.  Worldwide, the PI System actively handles over 1.5 billion sensor-based data streams.

The company primarily focuses on six core markets—oil and gas; utilities; pharmaceutical development and production; metals and mining; pulp and paper; and water—and is rapidly expanding into food and beverage, facilities and transportation.  Wind developers leverage the PI System to increase power production and reduce maintenance costs while mining operations use it to meet their goals for environmental compliance.  Water utilities save millions of liters of water a day by pinpointing leaks within the PI System.  The PI System can be found inside solar farms, breweries, data centers, cruise ships, leading research laboratories, power grids, stadiums and smart devices everywhere.

OSIsoft has also fostered an extensive partner ecosystem, including over 450 interfaces and connectors to translate and deliver PI System data to popular enterprise applications and cloud platforms.  More than 300 hardware manufacturers, software developers and system integrators produce PI System-based products and services.

“We have examined many data-intensive companies who assert that they will change the face of enterprise computing leveraging big data. OSIsoft has been steadily transforming the industrial sector for decades using a quantum of data heretofore not even envisaged by competing companies. OSIsoft provides the essential bridge between operational and information technology,” said Sheila Gulati, Managing Director of Tola Capital. “Partnering with the OSIsoft team on their strategic growth has been a tremendously rewarding endeavor. The Kennedy culture puts people first through their unwavering commitment to their customers and employees: this has provided the basis for their winning formula.”

Industrial IoT Analytics Framework Technical Report

Add Profit Control To Your Process Control

A long-time dream of enabling operators to see the profit impacts of process changes is a giant step closer to reality.

Much of my early career involved the intersection of engineering and profitability. No surprise that I valued my conversations with Peter Martin over the years. He has long been a proponent of just such technology and workflow.

Now at Schneider Electric (but still Foxboro), he has an organizational stability that may get the job done. Enter “EcoStruxure Profit Advisor.”

Developed through a partnership with Seeq, a leading provider of software and services that enable data-driven decision making, EcoStruxure Profit Advisor uses Big Data analytics to measure the financial performance of an industrial operation in real time, from the equipment asset level of a plant up to the process unit, plant area, plant site and enterprise levels. On-premise or cloud-enabled, it works seamlessly with any process historian to mine both historical and real-time data. It then processes that data through Schneider Electric’s proprietary segment-specific accounting algorithms to determine real-time operational profitability and potential savings.

Controlling Business Variables in Real Time

“While many companies are getting really good at controlling the efficiency of their operations in real time, they’re still managing their business month to month. That just doesn’t work anymore,” said Peter Martin, vice president of innovation, Schneider Electric Process Automation. “Business variables are changing so quickly—sometimes by the minute—that by the time companies receive updates from whatever enterprise resource planning systems they use, the information is no longer relevant to the business decisions they need to make or should have made. If they want to change the game, they need to control their other real-time business variables, including their safety, their reliability and especially their operational profitability. Profit Advisor allows them to do that.”

Because current cost accounting systems only measure the financial performance of the industrial operation at the overall plant level, it is difficult for companies to truly understand the financial impact—positive and negative—operational changes have on business performance. To address that need, Profit Advisor allows plant personnel to see and understand the ROI and business value their actions, activities and assets are contributing to the business in real time. It empowers the workforce to make better business decisions with a variety of data analytics, which can be displayed in various formats, to help drive operational profitability improvements, safely.

Innovating at Every Level to Deliver Value-focused IIoT

“Our customers are struggling with many issues, including the sheer speed of business and how to manage and use emerging technology to their advantage,” said Chris Lyden, senior vice president, Process Automation, Schneider Electric. “Everyone wants to talk about all this new technology without focusing on what value it can deliver. From our perspective, the digitization of industry is a real opportunity for our customers. We’re taking a value-focused approach to IIoT because we know our ability to innovate at every level can help our customers control their productivity and profitability in real time. That’s the only reason we should be talking about IIoT to begin with.”

Profit Advisor layers real-time accounting models onto the Seeq Workbench to become a scalable, repeatable and easy-to-implement solution for multiple segments, enabling customers to both measure and control their profitability. And because it can be integrated with Schneider Electric’s simulation and modelling software in a digital twin environment, users are further enabled to forecast profitability under different conditions or if changes to the operation are made.

Overall, the software provides

  1. Historical Data Review: Profit Advisor can evaluate the historical performance of the plant to assess its operational profitability, helping plant personnel analyze and understand how the
    operation performed during different conditions. It enables the workforce to identify true performance-improving initiatives. And since it can be tied to individual pieces of equipment, it can provide that information down to even the smallest asset in the operation.
  2. Real Time Performance Indication: Profit Advisor can indicate current performance and inform plant personnel when their operating decisions are making the business more profitable. Actual ROI and return on improvements will be visible, enabling plant personnel to concentrate and refine their efforts to the actions that provide the greatest financial returns. It also enables plant personnel to determine which parts of operation are constraining operational profitability and accurately estimate the business value their decisions might actually create.
  3. Profit Planning: Profit Advisor empowers process engineers to predict the profitability of the changes they are proposing, which will substantially minimize project risk and help to eliminate waste.

Check out this YouTube video.

Control Advisor

Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management and automation, has added a new enterprise-wide IIoT plant performance and control optimization software to its PES and Foxboro Evo process automation systems and Foxboro I/A Series distributed control system. Leveraging Expertune PlantTriage technology, EcoStruxure ControlAdvisor, a native smart decision-support tool, provides plant personnel actionable real-time operating data and predictive analytics capabilities so they can monitor and adjust every control loop across
multiple plants and global sites 24/7. The software empowers them to optimize the real-time efficiency of the process throughout the plant lifecycle and to contribute directly to improved business

Industrial IoT Analytics Framework Technical Report

New Data Science Company Figures Out What To Do With All That Data

Data Science has gotten us to the point of collecting servers full of manufacturing data. We can do some analytics. But there are miles to go before we sleep.

This press release crossed my email stream last week. I haven’t time to interview the founder–that will come later. But here is a teaser.

Data Science Pioneer Drew Conway Closes $2.5M in Seed Funding to Bring Machine Learning to Industrial Operations

New venture Alluvium delivers “Mesh Intelligence” to close the machine-to-human gap

Alluvium, developers of Mesh Intelligence solutions that harness machine learning insights for real-time applications in industrial use cases, today announced $2.5 million in seed funding led by investors IA Ventures, Lux Capital, and Bloomberg Beta. The machine learning venture is running pilot projects of its Mesh Intelligence technology in fleet management, and oil and gas, among other vertical industrial applications.

Alluvium aims to conquer one of big data’s greatest unsolved challenges for complex industrial operations with expert human operators. Alluvium’s breakthrough Mesh Intelligence solution frees the data from these proprietary systems, transforms it into rich information streams, and provides real-time insights to human operators for immediate action.

“The commoditized big data stack is fundamentally broken for complex industrial operations,” said Drew Conway, Founder and CEO at Alluvium. “Modern industrial assets and hardware are continuing to be instrumented by OEMs who have not considered how these heterogeneous streams of machine data should be leveraged in the overall workflow and data strategy of the organization. And the modern analytics ‘stack’ — where data is moved and crunched in back end systems — does not meet the real-time requirements of human operators at the edge.”

Conway, who earned his PhD at NYU, is a leading expert in the application of computational methods to social and behavioral problems at large-scale. He started his career in counter-terrorism as a computational social scientist in the U.S. intelligence community and is known for his venn diagram definition of data science as well as applying data science to study human decision making.

At the core of Alluvium’s Mesh Intelligence platform is unique technology for extracting data from all elements of complex industrial operations — tablets, sensors, as well as industry-specific assets — with no expectations of compute resources or network bandwidth. This breakthrough allows machine learning processing to occur at the edge of systems where human operators need data most — in-real time.

“The early days of big data were about capturing and storing the vast amounts of new information streaming from devices in manufacturing, transport, medicine and more,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudera, and a seed investor in Alluvium. “As that technology has matured, the more important and more interesting problem has become: What can we learn from all that data? Alluvium is focused on extracting meaning from streaming data coming from hardware that instruments all sorts of industries. The company augments human expertise with its powerful machine learning technology to make customers smarter and help them operate better.”

Independent research and surveys show the massive economic opportunity for IoT and machine learning across industrial use cases. A report by Jabil found that “$1.9 trillion dollars of economic value could be created by the use of IoT devices and asset tracking solutions.” For U.S. oil and gas suppliers — an industry where Alluvium has had significant early traction — the daily cost of unplanned downtime at a refinery can reach $1.7 million per day, and the daily cost of unplanned downtime for liquid natural gas drillers can top $11 million per day. A recent McKinsey report found that “car data monetization could be as high as $750 billion by 2030” — which has far-reaching implications for fleet management. Analyst firm Gartner forecasted more than 6 billion connected devices will be in use worldwide in 2016 supporting more than $265 billion in services. And in a 2015 “Moving Toward the Future of the Industrial Internet” report by GE and Accenture, 84% of executives expected Big Data to shift the competitive landscape within the next year.

“Bringing machine intelligence into the physical world is an incredibly difficult task,” said Shivon Zilis, partner at Bloomberg Beta. “We were excited to back Alluvium because of their unique insights into how complex industrial systems could be transformed by predictive engines.”

Learn More

Read Alluvium Founder’s Perspective on Starting the Company

 

Industrial IoT Analytics Framework Technical Report

Digital Transformation Theme of Dell EMC World

The conference was all about digital transformation. Company leaders must begin thinking about digitally transforming their companies or they face disruption from digital startups.

This was Dell EMC World—the first user conference after the major acquisition of EMC by Dell forming Dell Technologies. Touting the size and breadth of the combined companies, Michael Dell began the meeting, “Let the transformation begin.”

A poll of business leaders returned these sobering thoughts:

  • 45% may be out of business in 3 years;
  • 48% 2-3 years see big changes;
  • 78% digital startups will be a threat

As Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE put it, “You go to bed an industrial company and wake up a digital and analytics company.”

“Dell EMC will be the trusted provider of essential infrastructure for the next industrial revolution,” proclaimed Dell further into his keynote.

 

I attended the conference at the invitation of the Dell social influencer marketing group. Press conference attendance broke down as 41% analysts, 41% press, and 18% social influencers. They expect the press number to decline and influencer number to increase over time.

Michael Dell in press conference: “Internet of Everything helps customers embrace the digital future.” Dell also sees the need to help customers move from CapEx to OpEx. This need financial need from customers was echoed the next week at the Emerson Exchange. Companies in many industries at this time have slashed capital expenditures. Any movement forward in facility and process improvements must be done through operations expenditures.

dell-iot-2016jpg

This was my second Dell World. The Internet of Things group is just over a year old. Its unveiling was last year’s conference. This year’s presence was greatly enhanced. The booth layout simulated an ice cream factory (see diagram). Emerson Automation was represented (along with partners OSIsoft, Microsoft, and Dell) showing valves, wireless transmitters, date ported to a database into the Microsoft Azure cloud using a Dell IoT Gateway.

emerson-at-dell-world

Emerson’s Jim Cahill wrote this section of the process in his Emerson Process Experts blog.

Dell has taken an embedded PC platform, added its services, mixed in a variety of partners and baked up an IoT solution. Other partners included Air Watch, Eigen Innovations, V5 Systems, IBM, KMC Controls, PTC Kepware, ELM Fieldsight. Solutions included quality, security, data communications, analytics.

As I have written several times over the past year, Dell is serious about the manufacturing space. The IoT platform is designed to leverage Dell’s vast IT contacts to achieve IT/OT convergence from the IT side.

Dell Technologies new products

Dell Technologies is a serious technology player on many fronts. I’ll just highlight some of the many announcements it made during the conference.

Michael Dell was insistent that integration of Dell and EMC was achieving rapid results. Many of the products announced resulted from just that integration.

From the press release:

Global business leaders agreed that moving toward a cloud model, expanding software development capabilities and enabling faster innovation and deeper insights from data are key strategies to digital transformation. However companies are struggling to evolve their data centers, with 69% saying they are being held back by too many traditional applications. They are challenged with reducing sprawl and spend, while bringing systems up-to-date. New products and solutions announced this week at Dell EMC World are designed to help organizations accelerate their transformation and manage costs.

“To ensure that they’re not “Uber’d”, “Airbnb’d” or “Tesla’d” in their marketplace, today’s organizations must embark on a digital transformation. To truly realize their digital future, we believe the vast majority of organizations will transform their IT through a hybrid cloud strategy, ” said David Goulden, president, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell EMC. “The first ‘no regrets’ step is to modernize their data center through the most advanced converged infrastructure, servers, storage, data protection, and cybersecurity technologies to name a few. This week we are launching a wave of new products and solutions designed as the building blocks for this endeavor.”

Announced this week at Dell EMC World:

  • #1 Scale-Out NAS System Dell EMC Isilon Goes All-Flash For Unstructured Data
    Dell EMC will announce a new member of the Isilon product family, combining the high performance of flash technology with the #1 scale-out NAS platform in the industry. Dell EMC Isilon All-Flash is designed to help IT organizations modernize their infrastructure and deliver on the capabilities of a digital business.
  • Dell EMC Extends Common User Experience to SC Series
    Dell EMC will announced it has boosted the capabilities of its mid-market proven SC Series (formerly Compellent) storage arrays by making it interoperable with the world’s leading portfolio of storage management, mobility and data protection solutions formerly only available to EMC customers.
  • Extraordinary Dell EMC Partner Program To Provide Transformational Business Value and OpportunityDell EMC announced a preview of the company’s new and highly anticipated channel partner program. The Dell EMC Partner Program provides an unprecedented business opportunity for partners and validates Dell EMC’s commitment to the channel. Built on three core tenets—to be Simple, Predictable, and Profitable—the new program strategy ensures partners have ample opportunity, business continuity and commensurate profitability no matter their program tier.

 

Follow this blog

Get a weekly email of all new posts.