by Gary Mintchell | Jul 11, 2023 | Asset Performance Management, Data Management, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
Data management and analytics are two consistent current trends in the industrial / manufacturing technology market. This announcement from Emerson, now calling itself “a global software and engineering leader,” discusses how they brought these to asset management.
AMS Device Manager Data Server securely extends intelligent field device data to outside systems to make it easier for reliability and maintenance teams to further capitalize on modern advanced analytics software, providing a step change in operational efficiency and smart manufacturing.
AMS Device Manager Data Server publishes intelligent field device data nearly instantaneously to industrial software analytics solutions already in use by customers, eliminating the need for complex custom data integration and manual workarounds that often cause delayed results and siloed data. This data is relayed via secure industry protocols.
AMS Device Manager Data Server makes it easy to import critical instrument and valve data into common dashboarding tools and applications like Microsoft PowerBI, Emerson software tools such as the Plantweb Optics platform, Plantweb Insight, Aspen MTell and AspenTech Inmation, plant historians and others.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 10, 2023 | Automation, Data Management, Embedded Control, Events, Manufacturing IT, Process Control, Sustainability, Technology, Workforce
Honeywell Process Solutions held its annual HUG (Honeywell User Group) conference the week of June 19 in Orlando. I’ve taken some time to compile my many notes and think about the experience.
The marketing communications staff did an excellent job with media and analysts. We did not have time to waste what with presentations and 1:1 conversations.
I had not attended for a few years. For maybe three years I was in the influencer program with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HPE Discover is the same week. That program was disbanded a year or so ago. That marked the end of my IT affiliations. Those companies figured out there was not a lot of money to be made in manufacturing.
There were many questions begging for answers as I traveled to Florida. What was Honeywell HIVE, and how does it relate to the ExxonMobil initiated Open Process Automation group? What is Honeywell Digital Prime and what customer problems does it address? What successes have Honeywell achieved with sustainability initiatives? Honeywell was an early mobility developer. What has progressed in that regard? What role does Honeywell see for AR and VR?
Pramesh Makeshwari, CEO
He mentioned he’d been CEO of this group for only about nine months. Here are a few points of overview.
- Honeywell is not replacing people with technology but helping them perform better
- People have different learning styles and Honeywell products adapt to them
- Digitalization is a significant customer requirement
- Companies are on the Path to Net Zero Carbon
- Focus on Digital Workforce Competency
Evan Van Hook, Chief Sustainability Officer
He looks at sustainability as similar to the Quality Revolution where the goal was to produce quality outputs consistently creating a culture of quality. His question, “Can we create culture of sustainability?” Honeywell is taking a Lean approach—quality, delivery, inventory, cost, then add sustainability.
Lean is a systematic approach. The company overall has generated more than 6,500 projects over 13 years with ideas coming from the floor and everywhere else. Not a political statement, sustainability cuts costs and adds efficiency. A few milestone points:
- 92% reduction of CO2
- 70% improvement in energy efficiency
- Restored 3,000 acres of land
- Water savings
- 4x industry average safety
Act your way into a new way of thinking—Lean—put sustainability into Lean
Tiffany Barnes – Digital Prime
I perhaps had the most difficulty understanding Digital Prime. This is the Honeywell offering responding to the customer need for digital transformation. So, the conversation with Tiffany Barnes from that group was most instructive. Part of my cognitive dissonance perhaps came from this being a new offering only having one part released.
Digital Prime is most easily described as cloud-hosted digital twin of DCS. Some of the customer pressures Digital Prime addresses include:
- Risk of disruption, production downtime and plant safety
- Pressure to reduce overall lifecycle cost
- Do more with less through digitalization
- Data overload
- Reduced skilled workforce onsite
It is perhaps an irony that Honeywell build a virtual infrastructure to help with system acceptance then deleting it upon that acceptance. Customers began looking at digital transformation programs and realized that all this data Honeywell had was useful. This grew to a digital twin.
Honeywell’s Digital Prime is the up-to-date digital twin for tracking, managing, and testing process control changes and system modifications. It brings the highest level of quality control to the smallest projects: An efficient, compliant, and collaborative solution for managing changes, factory acceptance tests, improved project execution and training.
Providing secure cloud-based connectivity and a virtual engineering platform, it’s a collaborative environment for managing and testing additions, patches, upgrades and other system changes:
- Enabling functional reviews and impact analysis
- Supporting remote FAT tests
- Providing a training tool
- Documenting digital changes.
Joe Bastone — HIVE
Veteran editors and analysts were most curious about any Honeywell response to the initiatives undertaken by The Open Group to solve problems of economically and efficiently upgrading control systems.
This led to my intense interest in Honeywell HIVE and a subsequent conversation with Joe Bastone.
The problem lies with traditionally tightly coupled control hardware, software, and I/O.
Honeywell mostly solved the I/O problem years ago with its configurable I/O. That part of the control system continues to evolve.
The company then worked with a major customer about how to upgrade control software with minimal disruption. First, they worked out how to move the existing control software to a modern hardware platform leaving all the I/O in place. They realized that was in reality a form of virtualization. Moving to a virtualized compute environment effectively decoupling hardware and software was the obvious next step. Their I/O was already virtualized and decoupled.
So, Honeywell HIVE solves that upgrade problem that customers are searching for.
Thanks to Joe for walking me through the technology evolution.
Sarang Gadre — Battery Technology
The well documented issue with intermittent renewables (solar, wind) results from the laws of climate—the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine. Honeywell has had a commercial battery storage product for a while. It is housed in shipping containers. Introduced to us at HUG is the Ionic—a scalable, forklift-able, virtual power plant, with an energy control center in Experion. It is battery agnostic—you specify and buy your batteries of choice. The unit also features peak load shaving.
Naved Reza—Carbon Capture
I always enjoy conversations with Naved regarding sustainable technology solutions.
First up was reference to the ExxonMobil Baytown deployment of one of Honeywell’s carbon capture technologies – Honeywell’s CO2 Fractionation and Hydrogen Purification System. This technology is expected to enable ExxonMobil to capture about 7 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, the equivalent of the emission of 1.5 million of automobiles for one year.
Then we discussed Honeywell Ecofining—Renewable Fuel projects such as Diesel/Aircraft from biofuels. Also Ethanol to Jet and Methanol to Jet.
Aside from Baytown, there are a number of Carbon Capture (CO2) to blue hydrogen, renewable green, low carbon processing.
Manas Dutta — SafetyWatch Mobility
Performing maintenance on a pump involves an average of 3.5 round trips for the technician. Using augmented reality (AR) platforms can save many hour by providing the right documentation and required tools up front.
I made this trip closely following both the Apple Vision Pro announcement along with all the AI chat hype. So I had to ask Manas for his take from the industrial viewpoint.
“AR/VR are excellent for training especially as individualized based on AI feedback. AR/VR can also be useful for construction. When planning turnarounds, I can answer questions such as can I get a crane in, do I need scaffolding, without a visit remote site.”
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 30, 2023 | Cloud, Data Management, Internet of Things, Operations Management
MQTT is a fast, light-weight protocol for moving data. The origins were with an IBM application. It is now widely adopted in manufacturing and industrial applications when you don’t need the full information modeling of OPC UA. HiveMQ is a relatively new company specializing in MQTT application development. This new product from them is a starter kit for using a cloud-based MQTT solution.
HiveMQ announced HiveMQ Cloud Starter plan, a dedicated, fully-managed, self-service MQTT platform. HiveMQ Cloud allows customers to rapidly procure a production-ready MQTT platform based on hourly usage, with unlimited connections and devices.
With HiveMQ Cloud, companies can develop, test, deploy, and scale production IoT use cases without the large investment and complexity of maintaining their own infrastructure. Customers in any industry from transportation to connected products to manufacturing can get started quickly and easily for free, then scale as use cases expand and require additional features to enable security, observability, administration and data integrations.
“We are proud to be the first and only MQTT platform on the market to offer multiple plans that are not capped by the number of connections to the platform,” said Dominik Obermaier, Co-founder and CTO, HiveMQ. “We feel this will be a game changer for the adoption of MQTT from the developer to the enterprise.”
HiveMQ Cloud offers the following plans:
- Serverless: Community-supported, multi-tenant MQTT broker ideal for experimenting and learning; 100 sessions free.
- Starter: Self-service, single-tenant MQTT platform deployed in a Platform-as-a-Service environment; pay hourly as you grow.
- Professional: Everything in Starter plus access to robust support, observability, security, and integration extensions; pay hourly as you grow or choose an annual subscription.
- Enterprise: Dedicated MQTT infrastructure and custom systems integration for scaling sophisticated, enterprise-grade projects; pricing upon request.
The HiveMQ Cloud Serverless, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise plans address a wide range of customer needs for value-priced, cloud-based MQTT Platform-as-a-Service offerings to fit any deployment stage or budget. Any size customer from start-up to enterprise can start with the Serverless or Starter plans for pilot projects and POCs, and feel confident in their ability to scale to a comprehensive and feature-rich offering on the same platform.
by Gary Mintchell | May 12, 2023 | Data Management, Enterprise IT, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management
Pundits and writers of the manufacturing market harp on data. Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells us in his writings that we can keep accumulating data until we drown. Snowflake has data management tools used by many to handle all the data. This is a new release called Snowflake Manufacturing Data Cloud that looks full of possibility.
- Empowers manufacturers to collaborate with partners, suppliers, and customers to improve supply chain performance, product quality and factory efficiency
- Snowflake’s ecosystem of manufacturing partners delivers pre-built solutions and industry datasets to support a diverse set of manufacturing and industrial use cases
- Global manufacturers across industries, including ExxonMobil and Scania use Snowflake to drive digital transformation
Snowflake Launches Manufacturing Data Cloud to Improve Supply Chain Performance and Power Smart Manufacturing
● The Manufacturing Data Cloud empowers manufacturers to collaborate with partners, suppliers, and customers to improve supply chain performance, product quality and factory efficiency
● Snowflake’s ecosystem of manufacturing partners delivers pre-built solutions and industry datasets to support a diverse set of manufacturing and industrial use cases
● Global manufacturers across industries, including ExxonMobil and Scania use Snowflake to drive digital transformation
Manufacturing Data Cloud enables companies in automotive, technology, energy, and industrial sectors to unlock the value of their critical siloed industrial data by leveraging Snowflake’s data platform, Snowflake- and partner-delivered solutions, and industry-specific datasets.
Following are a number of lists with details and use cases.
- Building a data foundation: A single, fully-managed, secure platform for multi-cloud data consolidation with unified governance and elastic performance that supports virtually any scale of storage, compute, and users. It allows manufacturers to break down data silos by ingesting both IT and OT data and analyzing it alongside third-party partner data.
- Improving supply chain performance: Enable seamless data sharing and collaboration with partners for downstream and upstream visibility across an organization’s entire supply chain coupling its own data with data from third-party partners and data from Snowflake Marketplace. By leveraging this data with SQL and Snowpark, Snowflake’s developer framework for Python, Java, and Scala, different teams can collaborate on the same data and build AI and ML models.
- Powering smart manufacturing: Native support for semi-structured, structured, and unstructured high volume Internet of Things (IoT) data.
- Leveraging industry leading network of manufacturing partners: Take advantage of a rich partner ecosystem and industry-specific, prebuilt templates.
Partner Solutions
- Applications Powered by Snowflake include ones developed by Blue Yonder, Elementum, and Avetta.
- Snowflake Marketplace partners, include FourKites and Yes Energy enabling live access to a variety of data sources.
- Consulting and service organizations including Deloitte, LTIMindtree, and phData, offer pre-built solutions.
- Technology leaders, including Fivetran and Tableau, provide integrations and out-of-the-box solutions.
Customer use cases
- ABB – The technology leader in electrification and automation is using Snowflake to unify all of its data, including incoming raw materials from suppliers, plant production capacity, and sales orders, to streamline manufacturing operations and meet customer demand.
- EDF – The energy supplier for homes and businesses across the UK used Snowflake and its Snowpark Python development framework to build a complete machine learning operation solution in a few months, and deliver data products that lead to higher customer satisfaction and retention.
- Molex – A leading manufacturer of connectors, is using the Snowflake Manufacturing Data Cloud to fuel their digital transformation journey, including sharing data securely across the organization and with external partners and generating manufacturing shop-floor and business KPIs.
- Scania – The truck, bus, and industrial engine manufacturer uses Snowflake to continuously stream data from 600,000 connected vehicles and Snowpark for Python to prepare data for machine learning, which gives the company a comprehensive view for monitoring vehicle performance and supporting Scania’s product-related services.
