by Gary Mintchell | Oct 14, 2019 | Manufacturing IT
[Updated] Hitachi, a large industrial conglomerate, brought together several businesses it owned and acquisitions of Pentaho and Lumada into a wholly owned enterprise called Hitachi Vantara in 2017. NEXT 2019, its third customer conference attracted a large attendance to Las Vegas.
Hitachi was founded more than 100 years ago “to make products for good.” Thus the conference theme “Powering Good.” I have to say, it is so refreshing to see some ethics emphasis on doing good on display. It gave donations to the American Heart Association and the Rainforest Connection. Nice to see some ethics and doing good on the part of corporations.
Hitachi is involved in manufacturing, so the IT group has roots there, which is of course relevant to all of us. It is not just a random act that brought a manufacturing emphasis to Lumada–although it is used in many other industries as well.
I previously wrote about new products under the Lumada brand in May and September. Following are summaries of important announcements from last week.
DataOps: Data Management for the AI Era
I walked into the stand and told the guy, “DataOps is my new hobby.” I learned much about this new (to me) technology that I wrote about for the first time only a couple of weeks ago.
DataOps was briefly described to me as a pipeline for data. Hitachi Vantara says, “DataOps is enterprise data management for the artificial intelligence (AI) era, seamlessly connecting data consumers with data creators to rapidly find and use all the value in an organization’s data.”
DataOps is not a product, service or solution. Rather, it’s a methodology, and a technological and cultural change, to improve an organization’s use of data through better data quality, shorter cycle time and superior data management. Because organizations are not analyzing most of the data they have due to legacy methods, Hitachi Vantara believes DataOps will have significant impact on the future of IT by unlocking vast amounts of previously unused data.
Hitachi Vantara announced the expansion of the Lumada platform services and solutions portfolio to help customers across industries break down data silos and drive more innovation through DataOps. Hitachi is now extending Lumada’s capabilities beyond the internet of things.
New and updated Lumada offerings include:
Lumada Data Services, a set of software services that help customers manage increasingly complex data ecosystems with an intelligent data foundation.
Interoperating with Hitachi’s proven technologies for object storage, data integration, and analytics – underpinning Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), Pentaho and Lumada – customers can now cost-effectively govern and manage all their data assets, including structured and unstructured, across data center, cloud and edge locations. Policy-based automation tools orchestrate enterprise data flows to deliver on cost savings, compliance and business growth demands.
Lumada Data Lake, an innovative, “smart” data lake offering that is self-optimizing – and which intelligently places data sets in an optimal location – continuously curates to avoid data swamps and is readily accessible to analytics anywhere.
Lumada Edge Intelligence, a new set of software and validated edge hardware devices that enable organizations to manage data and analytics at the network edge for digital use cases such as IoT, connected products, immersive customer experiences, remote and disconnected sites, and branch offices.
Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5000 series and Hitachi Ops Center software form the company’s powerful next-generation storage and infrastructure foundation with a new scale- out, scale-up architecture for any workload at any scale. These technologies can accelerate data center workloads and deliver future-proof IT with a new, innovative architecture that is the ideal foundation for modernizing data center, cloud, and DataOps environments. The platform also features the world’s fastest NVMe flash array.
Hitachi Vantara expanded and enhanced its capabilities for cloud services in the first major announcement of the company’s newly formed cloud services portfolio. The portfolio includes cloud migration services, application modernization services, operations managed services, consulting services and Hitachi Enterprise Cloud (HEC). The portfolio leverages critical capabilities and industry-leading expertise from the company’s acquisition of REAN Cloud in 2018.
Data Integration and Analytics
Pentaho 8.3, the latest version of the company’s data integration and analytics platform software, introduces a series of features designed to support DataOps, a collaborative data management practice. This latest version delivers improved data agility from customers’ edge-to-multicloud environments while facilitating privacy, security and overall data governance.
Pentaho 8.3 introduces several enhancements:
- Improved drag and drop data pipeline capabilities to access and blend data that’s difficult to access
- New connector to SAP offers drag and drop blending, enriching, and offloading data from SAP ERP and Business Warehouse providing deeper insights into and greater analytic value from enterprise information
- Amazon Kinesis provides real-time data capability in an AWS environment. Pentaho allows AWS developers to ingest and process streaming data in a powerful visual environment as opposed to writing code, and blend it with other data, reducing the manual effort
- Improved integration with Hitachi Content Platform (HCP)
- IBM Information Governance Catalog (IGC) Integration
- Streaming data lineage make it easier to trace real-time data from popular protocols such as AMQP, JMS, Kafka, and MQTT
by Gary Mintchell | Oct 11, 2019 | Personal Development
I am at the Las Vegas airport United Club on my way home after an the Hitachi Vantara customer conference. I learned a lot about the company, people I knew, and the technology.
But I’m not here to talk about technology. That will be the next post. I’m here today to talk planning, perseverance, achievement.
Perseverance keeps you working toward your goal; Planning leads to confidence; Achievement follows.
The final keynote speaker at the conference was Alex Honnold. You may think you don’t know him, but he was the rock climber featured in the documentary “Free Solo” about his climb up the face of El Capitan. Alone. No ropes. No safety.
I can’t look down 10 feet without feeling a little queasy. He went up 3,000 feet.
His story was about quest.
More than that, it was the painstaking planning and practice. He didn’t just decide to climb and then go up the cliff. He spent months exploring the face of the cliff on ropes. He needed to know the right path up. He needed to know every hold, every potential rock slide, every bush.
Then he mentally rehearsed every step of the way. He knew exactly what needed to be done at each transition point. He had rehearsed it in his mind a thousand times.
He made it.
We, also, can learn from that. What do we want to achieve? What will it take to make it? Plan every step of the way. Rehearse it in your mind. Make sure you are physically/mentally/intellectually prepared. Go for it!
by Gary Mintchell | Oct 9, 2019 | Manufacturing IT
I am still talking about Emerson Exchange, and have a few more to go. This post is about analytics. Jonas Berge, Senior Director, Applied Technology, Plantweb, Emerson Automation Solutions, has often supplied me with great insight usually about networks in the past. We chatted briefly at Exchange and then followed up with email conversations. In this one, he talked about analytics.
Digital Transformation has a foundation in data. Data is useless without a formal way of thinking about it. There are two kinds of analytics tools.
We are left with two tasks. We must first understand the two types, how they are derived and their strengths and weaknesses.Then we choose the right analytics tool for the problem.
There are principles-driven tools and data-driven tools.
Data Science
One must remember that advanced predictive techniques can only be practically applied to a subset of use cases.
An over-emphasis on one approach means companies won’t position themselves to capture all the potential benefits.
When factoring the effort and expertise required to develop accurate machine-learning models, remember most organizations already have systems in place to record maintenance- and reliability-related data, but the effectiveness of such systems can be undermined by poor housekeeping. The same assets or issues may be described in different ways in different systems, for example, making integration difficult. Companies may use free-text fields to record issues or maintenance actions, making automated search or data analysis harder. Or critical data may be inaccessible, locked away in spreadsheets or on paper notes.
The application of machine-learning techniques to monitor asset condition has already received considerable attention, even though their cost and complexity may ultimately limit their application.
Engineered Analytics
When a machine is prone to a narrow range of well-understood failure modes, it is often possible to address a potential problem in a simpler way, for example by monitoring the temperature or vibration of a component against a set threshold.
Model-based predictive maintenance becomes a breakthrough way to solve selected high-value problems. This approach has the most potential where there are well-documented failure modes with high associated downtime impact, for example in a critical machine on a larger production line.
Root-cause problem solving, using approaches such as fault-tree analysis as well as cause-and-effect or failure-modes-and-effects analysis (FMEA), is a fundamental part of any organization’s maintenance and reliability strategy.
Not all condition-monitoring techniques require elaborate algorithms or complex models, however. Data-driven condition-monitoring approaches use simple queries that are run periodically or in real time against time-series data generated by machines and external sensors. If threshold conditions are passed, these systems can trigger investigative or corrective action in the digital-reliability-engineering workflow, or directly to maintenance execution.
by Gary Mintchell | Oct 8, 2019 | Asset Performance Management, Manufacturing IT, Software
This announcement from Schneider Electric originated from the conference in Barcelona that I will be attending in Austin, Texas. It supports a trend we’re seeing of suppliers breaking software into specific-purpose chunks to make it easier for customers to purchase, install, and maintain. The EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors suite points toward food and beverage; mining, minerals and metals; oil and gas; water and wastewater; and other industrial enterprises.
These comprise a specialized suite of smart manufacturing apps and digital services, providing easy-to-understand, real-time analytics.
“The digital transformation vision is coming to life for industrial operations,” said Sophie Borgne, senior vice president, Schneider Electric Digital Plant. “Industry 4.0 has embraced digitalization but now must get out of ‘pilot purgatory’ and scale up. Respecting an industrial enterprise’s operational investment, the modular EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors make it easy for plants of all sizes—not just big corporations to modernize at a sustainable pace and accelerate their digital transformation in very simple, step by step manner.”
Data-driven Plant Performance Management
Schneider rightly contends that IIoT blurs the line between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) yielding great amounts of data. The Advisors enhance asset optimization, asset performance management, predictive maintenance, and real-time decision-making.
Schneider Electric utilizes digitalization in its own factories. Using technology, including EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors, its Smart Factory in Bantam, Indonesia is reporting a 44% reduction in machine downtime in one year. The Schneider Electric Smart Factory in Vaudreil, France also implemented EcoStruxure Plant Performance Advisors, which contributed to:
- 10% reduction in energy consumption
- 25% improvement in plant operations efficiency.
- 20% reduction in maintenance costs.
- 20% reduction in diagnosis and repair time.
EcoStruxure Plant Advisors are fully configurable, off-the-shelf solutions for easy integration into even the most advanced systems. By providing users with a familiar application theme and environment, an efficient plant can create synergies for processes and empower digital operators. This greatly reduces the user learning curve, saving time and money.
Schneider Electric’s modular and scalable EcoStruxure Plant Advisors suite includes:
- EcoStruxure Pumping Performance Advisor is a new digital service for the continuous improvement of water and wastewater pumping assets in 24/7 operations. By addressing challenges such as cost of water, plants can save up to 15% in OPEX through pump optimization.
- EcoStruxure Equipment Efficiency Advisor provides real-time efficiency root cause analysis. It then recommends appropriate action plans for increasing capacity while reducing unscheduled downtime and waste, which often results in immediate 5% to 10% OEE gains.
- EcoStruxure Augmented Operator Advisor uses augmented reality to slash the amount of time a worker spends looking for information to about a tenth of current levels. By superimposing real-time data and virtual objects (point of interest, documentation, procedures) onto cabinets or machines, this “contactless maintenance” model also increases safety. EcoStruxure Augmented Operator Advisor V2.4 is easy to customize; no special platform knowledge is required. Users can also easily add augmented reality into existing procedures and export notes and analysis to share with others.
- EcoStruxure Secure Connect Advisor with embedded cybersecurity provides a digitally secure and simple asset monitoring connection for remote diagnostic and maintenance that reduces plant downtime while saving time and travel costs to maintain critical assets. In some cases, this has resulted in a shortened time to solution from over 7 days to as little as 4 hours.
EcoStruxure is Schneider Electric’s open, interoperable, IoT-enabled system architecture and platform.
by Gary Mintchell | Oct 7, 2019 | Commentary, Internet of Things
I have just returned from a weekend in Eastern Ohio at a youth soccer tournament. You learn a lot about human nature–your own as well as others–when you’re in a competitive tightly compressed space.
The games I refereed had coaches and parents carrying exhuberance carried way too far–probably into less positive descriptions. As director of referees for the tournament, I walked around observing other games, as well. Talked with a 15-year-old girl about her game. She told me the parents were the worst. They yelled unkind things directly at their goalkeeper including calling her a “bitch”. Sometimes I wonder.
This week I’m heading west for another IT conference. This one is Hitachi Vantara. I have had a few interviews lately with people from there as they have ramped up an Industrial IoT practice. I’m sure there will be more later this week.
What started me thinking about human nature and Industrial IoT suppliers was a comment I received a couple of weeks ago at another conference. “The trouble with the IT companies is that their sales people come in and promise that their Industrial IoT solution will solve all their problems.”
What engineer do you know who would believe that? Which ones would immediately tune them out and start thinking about their hobby?
I was a sales guy once. Or twice. I also was the guy from engineering who tried to explain the technology, benefits, and competitive advantage of our product versus the market. I also watched for when the sales peoples’ eyes glazed over. They didn’t want too much information. Too much gets in the way of a sales pitch. It’s partly just human nature and partly knowing their job.
That was a good comment. I don’t work with sales at these companies. Sure, the CEO is “selling” when they talk to me, but it’s a different selling. I write; I don’t buy.
It taught me to probe a little deeper into all these companies I cover–IT and OT–and get into what message they take to the prospect or customer. It may be entirely different from what I hear. And that would be a valuable part of the story.
