by Gary Mintchell | Jul 14, 2020 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software
I had an opportunity to talk with Ben Stewart, VP Product Strategy for Plex Systems, the other day to get my first deep dive for years. I talked with the company occasionally, but it was primarily an ERP developer with a robust MES incorporated. Much has happened lately.
What has set Plex apart for years is its SaaS, multi-tenant cloud offering. While competitors have only recently found a way to move from the license-based, client-server model to some form of cloud offering using browser-based connectivity with HTML 5 to offer visualization through tablets and smart phones.
Plex has made several moves within the past year to bolster its presence and offering and along the way garnered a Gartner recognition. First, Plex has made its MES available without its ERP so that users of other ERP solutions can add Plex SaaS MES. The second news is the Gartner recognition. And the third news item discusses Plex entering the IoT space through acquisition giving it a robust and comprehensive solution to its customers.
Plex Manufacturing Execution Suite (Plex MES)—a flexible cloud-based suite.
Plex Systems manufacturing operations capabilities are now available as a best-of-breed shop floor-specific offering called the Plex Manufacturing Execution Suite (Plex MES). This cloud-based suite is comprised of packages that satisfy the spectrum of smart manufacturing needs from MES to manufacturing operations management (MOM).
“Plex allowed us to quickly standardize our systems and processes across eight facilities globally, helping the company record production and quality checks in real-time,” said Jennifer McIntosh, ERP Manager of Gill Industries, a world-class supplier of advanced mechanisms and welded assemblies. “With the entire company now working from a single system of record, we are able to leverage MES capabilities to continuously improve our quality standards and optimize processes while reallocating our staff to focus on value-added business activities instead of system and server maintenance.”
Plex MES is designed to seamlessly connect insights from the shop floor up to the top floor, enabling production to deliver relevant real-time, operational information to key roles throughout the organization and empowering everyone to make better business decisions.
Plex MES gives manufacturers access to key capabilities required for smart manufacturing, including:
Error-proofed control: Choreographed production processes are driven directly from the quality control plan to shorten cycle times and improve efficiency. A unique operator control panel is paperless and easy-to-use, allowing for increased productivity and fewer manual input errors. In-line quality control governs quality activities to ensure check sheet compliance, and real-time production reporting allows for real-time decisions.
- High-resolution visibility: The full production lifecycle—from raw materials through finished goods—is accessible from anywhere on any connected device. Operations are monitored in real-time, delivering manufacturing intelligence for more accurate decision-making. Compliance risk is mitigated through database-driven traceability information, while increased visibility to asset performance creates more opportunities for continuous improvement.
- Seamless connectivity: Flexible, configurable cloud MES is connected by design. It is easy to deploy and standardize enterprise-wide while connecting to enterprise systems like a corporate ERP. Edge connectivity to industrial automation ensures at-rate production recording to Plex MES in the cloud. The Plex MES solution is fully unified, reducing the risk of disruptions common with an MES comprised of multiple point-solutions.
“There is an underserved need among large organizations to tap into the invaluable data generated in plants around the world,” said Bill Berutti, CEO of Plex Systems. “Plex MES answers that need by consolidating our 20 years of manufacturing expertise into a highly targeted smart manufacturing solution that enables operational visibility, transparency, and accuracy, helping manufacturers standardize operations across multiple plants.”
Gartner
Plex Systems announced that Gartner has recognized it as a Challenger in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Manufacturing Execution Systems. For this report, Gartner evaluates vendors on their Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. Plex is positioned furthest for Completeness of Vision in the Challengers quadrant and has improved its position on Ability to Execute compared to the previous year.
“We feel that recognition of Plex Systems as a Challenger is further validation of our ability to disrupt the MES market,” said Bill Berutti, CEO of Plex Systems. “Our manufacturing expertise is based on decades of helping customers exercise control over their shop floor operations while gaining access to invaluable data. Plex MES is flexible and scalable, answering a growing need among manufacturers to standardize their shop floors anywhere in the world.”
According to the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Manufacturing Execution Systems report, “The global MES market is a key pillar of smart factories and digital business for manufacturers. New technologies are starting to be leveraged, and disruptors are emerging. Supply chain technology leaders should use this research to select appropriate vendors and solutions.”
Plex delivers cloud MES and ERP to nearly 700 global process and discrete manufacturers. As a multi-tenant SaaS solution, manufacturers can easily implement, scale, and standardize operations with Plex across their plants throughout the enterprise.
Plex is also rated on Gartner Peer Insights, an online platform of ratings and reviews of IT software and services written and read by IT professionals and decision-makers. Verified, anonymous reviews provided by members of the Plex worldwide customer base include:
Plex Systems releases Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), a suite of solutions designed to solve business challenges generating from the shop floor.
Plex Systems released Plex Industrial IoT, which connects machines to the cloud, manages the resulting data streams, and contextualizes the information in real time. The first available offering will focus on asset performance management (APM), helping companies avoid manufacturing disruption caused by common problems like unplanned downtime, diminished machine performance, and substandard quality output.
Plex’s new solution enables manufacturers to implement and leverage connectivity in the era of Industry 4.0, breaking down siloes created by varying protocols and data types used by equipment and sensors by simplifying the connection to machines and the contextualization of data. Plex Industrial IoT grants access to the underlying machine intelligence, delivering to manufacturers timely and accurate insight in a single solution, eliminating operational surprises.
Plex Industrial IoT delivers:
- Continuous improvement through access to historical IIoT data: The first solution within the suite focuses on asset performance management (APM), starting with an understanding of current and historical activity. This real-time assessment empowers shift supervisors and plant managers with the data to understand behaviors, trends, and diagnose root cause of common challenges like machine failures, efficiency dips, or substandard quality output.
- Improved productivity with real-time asset dashboards: Plex Industrial IoT helps manufacturers monitor what is happening with any asset, in any facility, from any connected device with comprehensive pre-built dashboards. Customizable and real time, these dashboards deliver access to up-to-the-minute metrics and analytics. The information delivered by the dashboard enables manufacturing leaders to respond to live data immediately and accurately to improve operator performance or overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) mid-shift.
- Minimized operational disruptions by predicting and preempting unplanned downtime: Data collected over time with Plex Industrial IoT, analyzed against historical trends and contextualized against MES and ERP data from the same facilities, will expose an unprecedented quality of shop floor to top floor insights. This reduces operational disruptions to help manufacturers better plan for the previously unanticipated.
This is Plex’s initial Industrial IoT offering following the acquisition of IIoT leader DATTUS in July 2018.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 8, 2020 | Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Software
When it was time to leave paid employment and head out on my own, I looked for a domain name I could buy with “connection” in it. Surveying the landscape of technology and applications in 2013, I saw that despite a couple of decades of thought on connecting sensors at one end to business systems on the other this was still the future.
I also thought that I’d make a living in the MES space. Wrong! That space has never supported media or analysts. But Internet of Things came along and changed the conversation. And the technologies that evolved with IoT have enabled connectivity at new levels.
Here is the story of plant level (Ignition SCADA from Inductive Automation) to the execution level (Sepasoft MES) to business level (SAP).
In brief, Sepasoft launches Sepasoft Business Connector & Interface For SAP ERP Modules for connecting Ignition to business systems. Easy-to-integrate toolset democratizes connectivity between manufacturing and the enterprise.
Sepasoft Business Connector and Interface for SAP ERP is a suite of modules for connecting Ignition by Inductive Automation to business systems like SAP ERP. Connecting the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Manufacturing Execution System (MES) layers of manufacturing operations, the Sepasoft Business Connector provides intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces for developing business logic, transforming data, and mapping data between Ignition and other systems.
The combination of Sepasoft and Ignition by Inductive Automation becomes a first-class MES and connectivity platform for the enterprise.
To ensure that the new product suite would present a unique offering and adhere to industry best practices, Sepasoft teamed up with 4IR Solutions due to their deep expertise in enterprise and SAP integration. “The Sepasoft Business Connector offers increased flexibility and substantial cost savings versus existing solutions. When factoring in licensing, maintenance, training, engineering, and support, customers can expect to pay an order of magnitude less compared to leveraging other middleware or developing custom solutions,” said Joseph Dolivo, Principal of Digital Transformation at 4IR Solutions.
“The Sepasoft Business Connector will allow our customers to improve their operations while reducing their costs,” said Keith Adair, Product Manager at Sepasoft. “The Sepasoft Business Connector can link directly to SAP via the Interface for SAP ERP module and provides built-in templates for common data exchange scenarios. With the addition of our Web Services module, the Sepasoft Business Connector can communicate with other ERP and business systems that support SOAP and RESTful endpoints.”
“We’re very excited to welcome a native SAP connector and business connectivity tool to the Ignition ecosystem,” said Don Pearson, Chief Strategy Officer for Inductive Automation. “As an integrated part of the Ignition platform, the Sepasoft Business Connector supports familiar idioms like drag-and-drop, tag binding, and scripting, while requiring minimal configuration of third-party systems.”
4IR Solutions Corp is the leading provider of Life Sciences and enterprise integration consulting services for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and beyond. 4IR’s consultants have decades of experience providing companies with enterprise-wide connectivity, partnering with leading vendors to capture and encapsulate that experience into new and innovative products.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 7, 2020 | Enterprise IT, Security
Tim Bandos, VP of Cybersecurity at Digital Guardian set aside some time to discuss his latest work, The DG Data Trends Report. Research for the report was performed during (and as a result of) the Covid-19 pandemic to study how much sensitive corporate data was “egressing” from the security of home base.
We talked last month, but I was in the midst of five or six virtual conferences and I’m only now beginning to catch up with the accumulated pile of other interviews and reports that come my way.
Digital Guardian has developed and implemented a technology that you can procure that includes an “agent” that gives visibility into data movements within and into and out of your corporate environment. It sounds pretty cool, actually.
To set the stage for the current crisis, Bandos points to the results of the 2007-2009 financial crisis:
[The crisis] led to 37 million unemployment claims. It also resulted in a slew of trade secret theft charges. In 2013, the Department of Justice said it charged more than 1,000 defendants with intellectual property theft between 2008 and 2012.
The DG report derives from real data from organizations spanning the globe and across multiple industry verticals. It is definitely not just a survey.
Following are a few tidbits from the survey.
Since the onset of Covid-19, DG saw a 123% increase in the volume of data moving to USB drives and 74% of that data was classified according to the DLP practices. Now, much of this was taking work home. But much also this data can now not be controlled.
With employees working from their homes, data egress via all means (email, cloud, USB, etc.) was 80% higher in the first month following the World Health Organization’s declaration. More than 50% of the observed data egress was classified data.
Digital Guardian’s managed Detection & Response customers noticed a 62% increase in malicious activity, a number that in turn has led to an increase in incident response investigations—64% more than before the declaration.
Five tips to protect data
1. Issue Data Governance Policy Reminders
2. Label Sensitive Information
3. Limit Access to Sensitive Data
4. Host a Remote Security Awareness Training Session
5. Consider Deploying Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or Desktop-as-a-Service.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 3, 2020 | News, Organizations, Workforce
This recap of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) annual Living Progress Report for 2019 wraps up thoughts and coverage of all the many virtual conferences I experienced in June. The communications teams from all the companies worked hard and had to experiment in real time to bring out the best alternative to just completely shutting down.
These thoughts center on ethics—something given my experience in business I thought I’d never be writing about. If there were two institutions within which I worked where ethics was merely a word in the dictionary, they were business and church.
Thankfully that situation is changing, and this report from HPE is encouraging. I’ve met many people within the company. I don’t think this is superficial marketing-speak.
The report demonstrates HPE’s ongoing commitment to being a force for good by equipping customers with sustainable technology solutions, upholding HPE’s own high Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards across its value chain, and prioritizing company culture to fuel business outcomes by unlocking the innovation of team members.
“Our team members’ passion, ingenuity and resilience enable us to create technology solutions to tackle the many pressing challenges facing society today,” said HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri. “Current discussions around systemic racism, inclusion, and diversity demonstrate the importance of taking bold actions to create a more equitable and sustainable future. We are proud of our progress and committed to do more as a company and in partnership with our peers, customers, and partners.”
In 2019, HPE intensified its strategic focus on culture and launched the “Work That Fits Your Life” program to support a more inclusive workplace that values team members’ experience inside and outside of the workplace. New benefits include six months of paid parental leave for mothers and fathers, career reskilling and transition support, and a company-wide shortened work day once a month on “Wellness Friday”.
From the release:
HPE is investing in human capital because it wants to be a place where people can learn, develop skills and do career-defining work. HPE’s Executive Committee developed the “Work that Fits your Life” program in partnership with its Board of Directors, 54% of whom identify with one or more diverse groups. One of the key goals of the program was to drive inclusion in the workplace. And, the company began tying diversity metrics to executive compensation to further embed inclusion and diversity into the organization.
In 2019, HPE’s employee engagement score rose 10 percent and has risen an unprecedented 18 percent since 2017, and its team members clocked their one millionth hour of company-supported volunteer time since 2016. In addition, HPE offered opportunities to engage with more social impact activities through the inaugural HPE Accelerating Impact initiative.
This year’s Living Progress Report also, for the first time, details racial diversity statistics of its team member population, an important step in being transparent and addressing systemic bias and inequality in our society.
HPE announced that it would make its entire portfolio available as-a-service by 2022, a consumption model that can bring significant energy efficiency gains and cost savings to its customers by eliminating overprovisioning and allowing customers to pay for only what they use. In addition, service-based models allow HPE to maintain chain of custody over equipment to ensure recovery and refurbishment, reducing physical waste and the need to source substances of concern. In 2019, 88% of the nearly four million assets returned to HPE’s Technology Renewal Centers were given a new life, but shifting to more consumption-based solutions is predicted to dramatically reduce the consumption of unnecessary IT assets.
HPE remained on track to meet all of its 2025 climate targets, having reduced its carbon footprint by 47% in just four years. The company also introduced a new emissions reduction target for its transportation logistics footprint – aiming to reduce the footprint by 35% by 2025. It also continued to see opportunity to help customers thrive in a carbon constrained world – with efficient IT products and services representing nearly USD $7.7 billion in revenue in 2019.
HPE continued to hold suppliers to high environmental, social and ethical standards. In 2019, HPE’s supply chain audit and assurance improvement program touched over 133,000 workers and the company guided 51% of its suppliers on how to set their own science-based climate targets. In addition, HPE sought to promote inclusion and diversity through its supply chain by spending approximately USD $1 billion with small enterprises and minority, women and veteran-owned businesses in the United States.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 2, 2020 | Enterprise IT
The news in brief: New HPE GreenLake cloud services deliver an agile, lower cost, and consistent cloud experience everywhere.
We’re living in an as-a-service and edge-to-cloud world (to paraphrase the Material Girl). When Antonio Neri assumed leadership of the storied (at least part of the storied) Hewlett Packard, he grasped both that reality and that HPE had most of the tools to get there. A couple of acquisitions, a bolstered executive leadership team, and now the unveiling. There remain more work on the financial end for him, but I think HPE is positioned for growth in this arena.
Last year at Discover, HPE pushed the GreenLake idea on us. This year, it’s capabilities and possibilities are greatly expanded. And for my industrial / production readers–this applies as much to you as to Enterprise IT. It’s getting blurry at the Edge, apps like MES are moving to the cloud (actually, probably all have moved there), and the roles of Enterprise IT and Manufacturing IT are also blurring at the edges.
It’s a new world–and I don’t mean just post-Covid.
Following is from the release:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise today announced significant advancements to the company’s edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service strategy, through next-generation cloud services and an accelerated delivery experience for HPE GreenLake. The new HPE GreenLake cloud services, which span container management, machine learning operations, VMs, storage, compute, data protection, and networking, help customers transform and modernize their applications and data – the majority of which live on premises, in colocation facilities, and increasingly at the edge.
“Now more than ever, given current market conditions, organizations have an urgent need to connect and leverage all of their applications and data in order to transform their businesses, support their employees, and serve their customers,” said Antonio Neri, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “As we enter the next phase of the cloud market, customers require an approach that enables them to innovate and modernize all of their applications and workloads, including those at the edge and on premises. By delivering a consistent cloud experience everywhere through HPE GreenLake cloud services, and software designed to accelerate transformation, HPE is uniquely positioned to help customers harness the full power of their information, wherever it resides.”
Today, organizations are at a crossroads in their digital transformation efforts. According to IDC, despite the growth and adoption of public clouds, 70 percent of applications remain outside of the public cloud. Due to several factors, including application entanglement, data gravity, security and compliance, and unpredictable costs, organizations have struggled to move the majority of the applications that run their businesses to public clouds. Forced to support two operating models, organizations face additional costs, complexity and inefficiency, limited agility and innovation, and the inability to capitalize on information everywhere.
HPE delivers a unique approach to solving this dilemma by providing HPE GreenLake cloud services to customers in the environment of their choice – from edge to cloud – with a consistent operating model and with visibility and governance across all enterprise applications and data.
HPE GreenLake cloud services also provides customers with a superior economic model. Unlike public cloud vendors, which charge customers to get data back on premises, HPE charges no data egress fees. HPE GreenLake’s flexible as-a-service model and robust cost and compliance analytics tools allow customers to preserve cash flow, control spend, and prioritize investments that are aligned to business priorities.
“HPE GreenLake gives us 100% uptime, and the predictable pricing model is already helping us cut costs,” said Ed Hildreth, Manager of IT Distributed Systems, Mohawk Valley Health System. “Thanks to the cloud-like experience, when we needed to quickly activate additional features and resources in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to easily roll this out with no time delay. We are extremely pleased with HPE GreenLake and plan to leverage this model once again for new hospitals within our health system.”
Introducing New HPE GreenLake Cloud Services for Distributed Environments
HPE now offers cloud services for containers, machine learning operations, virtual machines, storage, compute, data protection and networking. All cloud services are accessible via a self-service point-and-click catalogue on HPE GreenLake Central, a platform where customers can learn about, price, and request a trial on each cloud service; spin up instances and clusters in a few clicks; and manage their multi-cloud estate from one place. They can all be deployed and run in the customers’ environment.
Based on pre-integrated building blocks, the new HPE GreenLake cloud services are now available in small, medium, and large configurations, delivered to customers from order to run in as few as 14 days. Partners and customers benefit from pre-configured reference architectures and pricing to speed time to consuming cloud services.
HPE GreenLake is one of the fastest-growing businesses in HPE with over 4 billion USD in total contract value
- Cloud services for Containers – These new HPE GreenLake cloud services, powered by HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, provide the flexibility to run containerized applications in data centers, colocation facilities, multiple public clouds, and at the edge.
- Cloud services for Machine Learning Operations – Through HPE GreenLake, customers can subscribe to a workload-specific solution built on the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and HPE Ezmeral ML Ops for the entire ML lifecycle.
- Cloud services for Virtual Machines, Storage, and Compute – For customers who want a private cloud experience, HPE is launching HPE GreenLake cloud services for virtual machines, storage and compute. With provisioning of instances in five clicks, these easy-to-deploy services also provide visibility into usage and spend, and active capacity planning with powerful consumption analytics in the HPE GreenLake Central management platform.
- Cloud services for Data Protection – For customers looking to modernize data protection, HPE is making data backup and recovery effortless and automated for every SLA – from rapid recovery to long-term retention. These new cloud services through HPE GreenLake include secure and efficient on-premises backup and an enterprise cloud backup service, HPE Cloud Volumes Backup, which enables backup and recovery to/from the cloud without egress costs or lock-in, and with the agility to activate data for recovery, test/dev, and analytics.
- Cloud services for the Intelligent Edge – Today, more than ever, customers are looking to reduce CapEx to simplify their budget process and better predict and manage network operational costs. Aruba’s new Managed Connectivity Services, now available as cloud services through HPE GreenLake, provide the industry’s first complete Network as a Service offering, and bring cloud agility to the edge with the recently introduced Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform).
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 1, 2020 | News, Organizations, Standards
CII and MIMOSA sign Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to use the Open Industrial Interoperability Ecosystem (OIIE) as the interoperability framework for CII best practices.
I’m a believer based upon long experience that standards and interoperability drive industries (and society) forward. Just look, for example, at standard gauge railroad tracks or standard shipping containers or Internet protocols. I should also note that I worked on the development of the OIIE several years ago, but they got to the point where I could not contribute for a while. As I wrote recently, things are coming together in this effort for interoperable data flow from engineering design through construction to operations & maintenance throughout the lifecycle of a large capital project.
Here is the latest, and very important, news.
CII (The Construction Institute) and MIMOSA announce their collaboration to adopt and progress the standards for an open, vendor neutral digital ecosystem supporting data and systems interoperability in capital projects, operations and maintenance enabling digital transformation of the full asset lifecycle. The MOU establishes the basis for a CII/MIMOSA Joint Working Group to develop best practices for standards based interoperability in capital projects leveraging the organizations combined strengths.
It will develop formal OIIE Use Cases for capital projects based on Industry Functional Requirements developed by CII, starting with those associated with Advanced Work Packaging (AWP). These OIIE Use Cases will be validated in the OIIE Oil and Gas Interoperability (OGI) Pilot before they are published and licensed for use on a world-wide royalty free basis. Once the jointly developed OIIE Use Cases are validated in the pilot, CII and MIMOSA intend to submit them to ISO TC 184/WG 6 for inclusion in future parts of ISO 18101.
The OIIE is an outgrowth of collaboration between multiple industry-level Standards Developing Organizations, where MIMOSA plays a key leadership role and has led the workstreams for digitalization and interoperability in support of asset life-cycle management. The OIIE OGI Pilot includes standard use cases for asset intensive industries, currently featuring an example oil and gas industry process unit.
Active collaboration has begun, by sharing the existing OIIE Use Case Architecture and asset lifecycle management OIIE Use Cases previously developed by MIMOSA and validated in the OIIE OGI Pilot. CII has shared the AWP data requirements that are under development by CII.
Next steps will begin to include CII AWP best practices in applicable, OIIE Use Cases for capital projects, including jointly enhancing existing use cases and the joint development of new ones. CII and MIMOSA encourage interested organizations to join and participate in each association to fully support this important industry-led effort.
Organizations that participate have the potential to benefit in many ways including:
- System of Systems interoperability results in less reliance on expensive, fragile, custom integration between systems, reducing IT costs while increasing agility and sustainability.
- Education and training to a common set of industry practices and standards, provides a more flexible and efficient digital economy work force, benefitting industry and workers alike with reduced loss of knowledge and expertise.
- Investment in future proofed, vendor neutral, interoperable data, enables industry to create, capture, manage and reuse digital information, as a strategic asset throughout the entire physical asset lifecycle, deriving significantly more business value from capital projects.
- Owners identified the opportunity to cut CAPEX spend by 15-20% through better information sharing with improved schedules and productivity due to far less time wasted looking for information, and much more time on tools.
CII, based at The University of Texas at Austin, is a consortium of more than 140 leading owner, engineering- contractor, and supplier firms from both the public and private arenas. These organizations have joined together to enhance the business effectiveness and sustainability of the capital facility life cycle through CII research, related initiatives, and industry alliances.
MIMOSA is a 501 (c) 6 not-for-profit industry trade association dedicated to developing and encouraging the adoption of open, supplier-neutral IT and IM standards enabling physical asset lifecycle management spanning manufacturing, fleet and facilities environments. MIMOSA standards and collaboratively developed specifications enable Digital Twins to be defined and maintained on a supplier-neutral basis, while also using Digital Twins to provide Context for Big Data (IIOT and other sensor-related data) and Analytics.
