In the category of people moving on and qualified replacements needed, this post-Hannover news came to me from FDT Group. I’ve known and interviewed Paul Brooks for many years. I don’t know Mr. Birkhofer, but I’m sure these are great additions to the board.
FDT Group, an international, non-profit industry association supporting the evolution of FDT technology for industrial device management announced that Paul Brooks, manager, technology business development, strategic development for Rockwell Automation; and Rolf Birkhofer, managing director for Endress+Hauser digital solutions have been voted in by the FDT Group member community to serve in leadership roles on the FDT Board of Directors.
The FDT Group Board of Directors sets the executive strategy for the organization and provides governance over the open FDT standard, which directly benefits the global manufacturing automation industries with a unified environment for industrial device management and IT/OT data-driven operations for the process and discrete markets supporting smart manufacturing, efficiency, and sustainability initiatives.
Mr. Brooks and Mr. Birkhofer replaced board members Lee Lane, Rockwell Automation; and Francois Ichtertz, Endress+Hauser, respectively, due to their departure to new roles. They join existing board members including Andre Uhl, Schneider Electric; Michael Kessler, PACTware; Shinji Oda, Yokogawa; and Ed Silva, Flowserve Corporation.
FDT Group Managing Director Steve Biegacki congratulated the newest board members. “We appreciate the service Lee Lane and Francois Ichtertz provided to our organization. Paul Brooks and Rolf Birkhofer bring a wealth of process and factory automation industry experience to their new posts on our board,” Biegacki said. “They will play an important role in guiding the FDT Group organization and FDT/DTM technology roadmap through collaborative initiatives focused on innovation and differentiation that deliver new value to customers.”
Mr. Brooks has over 30 years of experience in the industrial market and currently leads the commercial & technical teams responsible for the strategy around open aspects of the Rockwell Automation System Architecture. This includes Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and Field Xchange (FX) strategy, EtherNet/IP development, network architecture, 5G direction, and application orchestration. He was a member of FDT Joint Interest Group (JIG) in 2003, recognizes the importance of FDT in the market as the preferred integration standard for UAFX, and is committed to fostering market insights and relationships to allow FDT to develop in parallel with communication technologies to enable innovation.
Mr. Birkhofer’s near 20-year career in industrial automation stems from his Electrical Engineering background and managing director roles at CodeWrights and Endress+Hauser. Currently overseeing digital solutions for process applications at Endress+Hauser, he is deeply involved with technology standards groups including Advanced Physical Layer (APL), Device Descriptions (DD), Field Device Integration (FDI) and Field Device Tool / Device Type Manager (FDT/DTM). He is committed to prioritizing FDT technology investments that expand end-to-end interoperability and data harmonization, granting new business and service models for industrial markets.
The FDT Group AISBL is an international non-profit corporation consisting of leading worldwide member companies active in industrial automation and manufacturing. The major purpose of the FDT Group is to provide an open standard for enterprise-wide network and asset integration, innovating the way automation architectures connect and communicate sensor to cloud for the process, hybrid and factory automation markets. The FDT standard is globally adopted by IEC 62453, ISA 103, and GB-T 29618-2017 with millions of Device Type Managers (DTMs) in use. FDT Technology benefits both manufacturers and end users, with advancements such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industrie 4.0 delivered out-of-the-box – enabling modernized asset integration and access to performance data for visualizing crucial operational problems. Around the world, end users, manufacturers, universities, and research organizations are working together to develop the technology; provide development tools, support, and training; coordinate field trials and demonstrations; and enable product interoperability.
The first time edge compute and edge applications came my way was through IT companies—Dell in 2015 and HPE in 2017. They both still have edge devices and “edge-to-cloud” strategies. Neither comes to me with information or invitations to user groups anymore. Even though you might expect the natural “edge” in manufacturing would lie with the automation vendors, such is not the case. They don’t talk to me about edge, either.
You might think of this as a little out of the ordinary, but Nokia while transitioning from mobile handset supplier has become an edge device developer and supplier. This news relates to some new initiatives and products from that company from Finland.
Industrial IoT platforms connect, collect and analyze data from disparate sources –including video cameras – unlocking its value.
New security function protects from advanced threats in OT environment, improves security, which is essential for data exchange.
Nokia today launched four third-party applications for MX Industrial Edge (MXIE), which help enterprises connect, collect and analyze data from operational technology (OT) assets on a robust and secure on-premises edge. Asset-heavy industries can accelerate their digital transformation and benefit most from Nokia’s OT edge ecosystem-neutral approach, which taps into innovation from many top digitalization enablers. The new applications also leverage the GPU capability recently announced on Nokia MXIE, a powerful on-premises OT edge solution that helps process data closest to the source in real time while retaining data sovereignty.
Today’s news builds on Nokia’s partnership with Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, which has a focus on designing, deploying, and managing industry-leading LTE and 5G private wireless networks and Industry 4.0 solutions to enterprises worldwide. By combining Kyndryl’s network and edge advisory and integration services with Nokia’s private wireless networks, industrial customers can achieve high-performance wireless connectivity in mission-critical environments. As a converged compute platform, Nokia MXIE supports the core operation of private wireless networks and hosts a multitude of OT edge computing applications. By leveraging Nokia MXIE, Kyndryl is helping customers implement end-to-end industrial use cases with a single orchestrated on-premises edge for both private wireless and digitalization enablers. The automation and digitalization benefits, from predictive maintenance, better worker safety, to quality assurance enables smarter, leaner factory operations and improves sustainability across industrial verticals – from manufacturing, energy and gas, to mining.
Betacom recently talked with me about its new Private 5G Ecosystem. To me the term ecosystem implies a (usually) proprietary software platform where a company hopes to recruit a critical mass of companies to commit. This ecosystem looks more like what I’ve been taught to be more resilient and perhaps useful—loosely coupled. And certainly private 5G networks are finally coming to fruition after a long gestation.
Betacom and its partners, including Google Cloud, Intel, Ingram Micro Inc. and Qualcomm Technologies, are collaborating to design, validate and deploy solutions for a variety of enterprise applications – setting the stage for the next phase of economic and business evolution driven by connectivity, automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning and real-time data. (I apologize for allowing almost every buzz word into the article.)
The partner initiative will help to expedite solutions through open collaboration aimed at building an ecosystem of pre-tested Industrial IoT devices and applications, integrated with mobile edge compute, supported by established system integrators and powered by private 5G.
The ecosystem currently includes 15 companies from across the technology spectrum – each with unique domain and industry expertise. Charter members include:
Ara Surinam, VP Product Management at Plex which is now a Rockwell Automation company (one of the ways Rockwell moved into the cloud), talked with me recently about using AI/ML (artificial intelligence as machine learning) in an industrial software setting. Ara was part of the development of Cloud Command Center in 2007.
He noted that the goal is to improve business outcomes for customers. One way involves compensating for the fact that few companies employ lots of data scientists. Another is to help them leverage technology as a way of forecasting demand.
With all the disruptions to the supply chain we have witnessed over the past few years, Plex leveraged ML to evaluate project information in a way that does not require data scientists. Another part of AI is neural nets, and Plex leverages that technology with “deep AI” toward structuring data for enhanced customer supply chain decision making.
Here are a few additional bullet points of information:
Make it repeatable, spreadsheets are prone to error.
Focus on anomalies.
Balance growth, cost, inventory, and production with real-time plant floor data to effectively forecast—and deliver on—customer demands.
Gain higher forecast accuracy and meet customer expectations with reliable delivery dates based on current resources and capacity.
Make production planning trade-off decisions considering rough-cut capacity constraints, inventory and customer service levels.
Utilize advanced production planning options to level-load manufacturing across multiple plants.
Reduce supply chain costs with a more realistic master production schedule that drives material, production, and resources allocations.
Gather data from across departments, plants, and supply chain channels, for a single-version of supply chain plan.
This is from last week’s newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on the envelope icon or here.
The media are going all things AI crazy. I see it on LinkedIn, Twitter, rss newsfeed. Then I see some manufacturing specific references discussing autonomous plants.
On a recent podcast episode, Seth Godin just spoke about the two ends of a spectrum of everything on our online or human touch. He was talking about retail business, but I thought about the autonomous plant.
First, we technologists do things because we can. You see it all over Silicon Valley might’ve a guy is just do 20 we can do this and let’s do this.
We did that in manufacturing and production automation. I talked with the CEO of a company who was perhaps an instigator of the expansion of digital automation technology in production plants, and he remarked that a an unfortunate byproduct of this automation is that we took the operator out of the plant and placed them in a cinderblock building, darkened with computer screens in front of them previously the operator would come to work walk through the plant and listen and smell and could say everything seems right or something smells a little funny we better check out that valve over there which leads to what can we really really have an autonomous plant or manufacturing facility?
What do we lose by removing people from a facility? We lose those analog capabilities of sight and smell and hearing. we lose the creativity of two or more people looking at a problem, and figuring out how to solve it. machine learning might be able to tune a machine, but can it retune it when it inevitably goes out of tune? Can it think of a better machine or a better way to put things together a better way to serve the customer in fact, does an autonomous plant even realize about a customer?
Some things to think about as we discuss the powers of chatGPT, or other artificial intelligence Technologies, that may come along I think people are still important
For more on large language models and ChatGPT, I recommend Cal Newport’s podcast discussion and Stephen Wolfram’s discussion. These discussions probe the reality behind the hype and dispel myths about AI taking over the world–or your job.
For more on large language models and ChatGPT, I recommend Cal Newport’s podcast discussion and Stephen Wolfram’s discussion. These discussions probe the reality behind the hype and dispel myths about AI taking over the world–or your job.
I’ve uploaded a new podcast discussing a few themes from my recent webinar–disruption, innovation, people.
