Predictive Maintenance and Inventory Optimization

Fluke Reliability partners with Verusen to Drive Predictive Maintenance and Inventory Optimization

The new trend for 2024 involves spreading applications from the factory floor specifically to maintenance and repair and parts. Here is a partnership designed to enhance spare parts inventory plus predictive maintenance. It does make sense to bring those two together. I sold a program once a long time ago that would have been a first step along this journey.

  • Verusen enables visibility into customers’ spare parts and inventory data across the enterprise
  • This complements Fluke Reliability’s commitment to providing enhanced visibility into enterprise asset management operations 
  • The two companies provide customers with an expansive toolset to shift from reactive to predictive maintenance utilizing AI functionality 

Fluke Reliability has entered into a formal partnership agreement with Verusen. The agreement combines Verusen’s AI-driven visibility of MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) spare parts inventory and back-office functions with Fluke Reliability’s AI-powered enterprise asset management solutions to increase uptime, enhance maintenance and reliability operations efficiency, and drive customer productivity.

Verusen has been added to Fluke Reliability’s Industry and Technology partner program which is designed to enable customers to better integrate and automate connected reliability workflows for improved operations. This move underpins both companies’ commitment to helping customers shift to more proactive maintenance and reliability operations, maximizing uptime and accelerating efficiency worldwide.

AI Solution for Manufacturing Services

Remember when AI was hidden, buried deep within the program? Now a marketer is derelict in duty when not promoting AI in the product. Not to say it isn’t beneficial. Just that there’s more to it, we hope, than AI meaning that it solves a real problem.

This news is from ServiceNow. Their solutions span broader industries than manufacturing. I have parsed the news for what is relevant to me.

ServiceNow announced new purpose-built solutions for the manufacturing industry to help power faster, more efficient operations and better employee experiences. Manufacturing Commercial Operations (MCO) incorporates generative AI (GenAI) to streamline sales, service and support, and order-to-cash processes. Employee Center (EC) Pro Kiosk brings intelligent self-service experiences to deskless workers, making it easy for them to access company communications, relevant resources, and seamlessly navigate hire-to-retire processes.

Manufacturing Commercial Operations is built on top of ServiceNow Customer Service Management and Sales and Order Management. It offers a single, generative AI-powered solution for order exceptions, dealer operations, customer service and support, order-to-cash operations, and product and quality management. It seamlessly integrates with manufacturers’ existing systems to help make work easier, faster, and more transparent.

Capabilities within Manufacturing Commercial Operations allow manufacturers to:

Transform field operations: MCO integrates with ServiceNow Field Service Management, making it easy for manufacturers to deliver proactive, preventative maintenance and dispatch and route technicians to the right work to fix problems fast. If a customer reports an equipment issue, customer service teams can quickly log the problem and deploy a field technician with the necessary knowledge, skills, and equipment to manage the task – all from within MCO. Real-time updates are sent to the technician’s mobile device, including the customer’s location and details about the product model, helping ensure that the technician has the necessary information and assets for their visit, reducing downtime and solving problems as efficiently as possible.

Employee Center Pro Kiosk is an intelligent self-service walk-up experience that provides a front door for everything the manufacturing factory worker needs, from requesting time off, to reviewing benefits, asking a payroll question, or accessing the latest company news and information. With EC Pro Kiosk – part of ServiceNow HR Service Delivery – employees can access critical company information and applications via a kiosk on the manufacturing floor by scanning a QR code on a personal phone or through personalized SMS messages. By bridging the communication gap between the employee and the company, leaders can help ensure deskless workers are in the loop on important updates or decisions and have the resources they need to stay informed and receive support, improving employee engagement.

Ocean Data Systems Launches Dream Report Professional Services 

What can you do when you have a product, but its lifecycle appears to be nearing saturation? Turn to services. That’s what all the big boys are doing. So also is Ocean Data Systems. Known for Dream Report, the company is launching Dream Report Professional Services. 

New Dream Report services include:

• Project development 

• Technical audits and review of existing projects 

• Technical consulting and applying best practices 

• Development of custom reporting objects and custom communication drivers

• Fundamental, advanced, and custom training programs

These and other customized initiatives offered by the newly formed services team will significantly increase user satisfaction by optimizing the value of their Dream Report software. 

The professional services team is comprised of experts with in-depth regulatory and compliance expertise. Training and project consulting experts draw on an extensive knowledge base of product use cases, technical hints, and best practices. Direct access to Dream Report R&D will also give users a faster path to key technology experts, who can solve complexities and challenges in reporting. The Dream Report Services project development team members, experienced with a wide variety of automation platforms and product implementations, will deliver unique insights on how to achieve specific and customized requirements that drive ROI.

Schneider Electric Launches Digital Transformation Services

My first digital transformation project in manufacturing was in 1978. We had an IBM Series 3 minicomputer. I procured (leased) a set of programs from IBM. There were classes and other training. I remember a trip to New York City. We put all current engineering data on that little machine (not nearly as powerful as the thing in my lap that I’m typing on). Then…the market tanked, the company was sold, the president was fired by the corporate overlords, the new president fired my boss the vice president, the new vice president fired me (stuff runs down hill).

But they couldn’t take away the learning.

That’s why I look with prejudiced eye at the marketing and analyst aspect of today’s articles on digital transformation. We’ve been at it for a long time.

On the other hand—

  • Compute platforms grow ever more powerful
  • Databases become ever better servants of our data needs
  • Organizations grow to incorporate new digital realities

New products and services that help end users get better at this digital journey provide needed support. Aside from hype, these are good. 

At the ARC Industry Leadership Forum in Orlando February 6-9 this year, I had a chance to listen to people from Schneider Electric describe their new offering. I’m sure many customers will find it quite useful.

  • Industrial Digital Transformation Consulting and Deployment Service 
  • Specialized end-to-end service to accelerate successful digital transformation strategic planning and implementation for industrial businesses 
  • Sustainability, industrial performance, digital operations, and energy management experts to drive transformation at enterprise and local levels 

Industrial Digital Transformation Services offering is designed to help industrial enterprises achieve future-ready, innovative, sustainable, and effective end-to-end digital transformation. (OK, that was the marketing hype.)

The targeted benefits include:

  • operational efficiency and workforce empowerment 
  • sustainability and energy efficiency 
  • asset optimization 
  • cybersecurity

And, I’ll close by giving you a quote from the organization leader:

“Successful industrial digital transformation requires a global vision that is agile enough to support local needs,” said Marc Fromager, SVP Industrial Automation Services, Schneider Electric. “Successful programs encompass efficiency, sustainability, and employee empowerment, underpinned by robust cybersecurity. What elevates Schneider Electric is our unmatched combination of digital transformation experience across a myriad of industries, supported by our world-leading energy management and automation technology and software—all delivered by local experts with the full backing of our global teams.” 

Emerson Exchange 2022

The control and automation market I’ve been in since the late 90s has definitely become a software market. Yes, the main players that remain do still have their legacy controllers, instrumentation, sensors, and networking. The excitement that remains is mainly software and services. Domain expertise within the supplier community becomes increasingly important. 

I was coming off a vacation (not planned by me) and couldn’t work out the logistics of making it to Dallas. I kept up with things through press releases and reports from social media guru Jim Cahill. I survived missing presentations by the inimitable CTO Peter Zornio. News came through, anyway.

Announcement summaries follow. 

Boundless Automation

This next-generation architecture will empower companies through “boundless automation” to manage, connect and deliver operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) data seamlessly and easily across the enterprise. Moving data freely and securely across OT and IT domains – from the intelligent field to the edge and cloud – will enable operational and business performance optimization across the enterprise.

It really is all about the data.

Check out Jim Cahill’s report.

DeltaV

  • Emerson’s Latest Control System Update Lays Foundation for Software-Driven, Data-Centric Automation Platform
  • DeltaV version 15 helps drive faster, easier digital transformation to accelerate IT/OT convergence, enabling easy upgrades and modernization

Intelligent Field

PlantWeb plus recent acquisition AspenTech = Emerson’s Plantweb digital ecosystem, optimized by AspenTech, enables industrial manufacturers across all industries to “See, Decide, Act and Optimize” their operations. Leveraging a robust suite of sensors, software and control technologies, Plantweb now enables companies to optimize the business and sustainability performance of their plants and enterprise through advanced asset and business optimization software.

SCADA

Movicon.NExT 4.2 is a flexible, modular platform that provides local HMI, supervision and analytics that scale from small IIoT or WebHMI applications on embedded Linux devices to large Windows server systems, allowing users to achieve sustainability and performance improvements, one step at a time, easily and cost effectively.

I/O Interface

Emerson has released DeltaV IO.CONNECT, a new subscription software service designed to help plants simplify modernization with an open architecture pathway that makes it possible to transition to more efficient control schemes without the need to completely overhaul existing infrastructure. In a traditional plant with tens of thousands of I/O points and many controllers, this can save hundreds or thousands of hours of labor and up to 40% of the capital required for a total rip-and-replace upgrade.

Hydrogen Production

Southern California Gas (SoCalGas), a regulated subsidiary of Sempra, has selected Emerson’s digital technologies, software and services to demonstrate the resiliency and reliability of its new [H2] Innovation Experience in Southern California. One of the first microgrid projects of its kind in the United States, the [H2] Innovation Experience is a technology demonstration that aims to show how carbon-free gas made from renewable electricity can be used in pure form or as a blend to fuel clean energy systems of the future.

Rockwell Automation Announces Edge-to-Cloud and Upgraded Asset Management

Here are two interesting announcements from Rockwell Automation this month. DataOps and asset management subscription service—both technologies for the future.

Edge-To-Cloud

IT companies have been touting edge-to-cloud architectures for several years. I’ve followed several of those companies until they decided there’s not enough revenue from the industrial market to satisfy them. Industrial technology suppliers have been notoriously slow to adopt new technologies. But the pace is picking up. 

In my next post after this one, I’ll discuss another industrial company who has discovered edge-to-cloud as a promising architecture of the future. Rockwell Automation beat them by few days. I have two announcements from Rockwell from last week revealing that company’s continued advance into software and IT-related technologies. Some executive sources in the industry have told me that Wall Street is driving much of this strategy by valuing software companies over hardware companies. 

Check out Rockwell’s investment in and subsequent partnership with PTC that enhanced its software connectivity of automation to IT. Then acquisitions of Plex and Fiix to get into the cloud. Now a partnership with Cognite for a data hub—yet another key component.

  • Strategic partnership to develop a unified, edge-to-cloud industrial data hub offering
  • Combines Rockwell’s FactoryTalk software with Cognite’s Industrial DataOps platform Data Fusion [Note: I’m on record somewhere predicting DataOps as a cool tool for the future.]

My Equipment Subscription

I always forget that often when Rockwell talks asset management, it’s not the same thing as when a process automation company discusses it. In Rockwell speak, this means keeping track of Rockwell assets in a manufacturing company.

  • My Equipment Digital enables digital collection and updating of industrial automation asset data through the use of network-based devices. 
  • The digital collection method includes firmware information and a one-time vulnerability assessment.
  • Customers can self-manage and track their installed base automation assets
  • The self-manage feature can be added to an Installed Base Evaluation (IBE service) and is included in the My Equipment Digital and My Equipment Managed offerings.
  • Mitigate network risks if legacy products and/or unmanaged switches are found
  • Review modernization potential to determine risks and productivity improvement opportunities by identifying which older products may be less expensive to repair than to buy new
  • Provide adequate remote support coverage by confirming that the most prevalent technical segments are covered
  • Reduce costs through the optimization of asset and spares strategies by comparing storeroom data to the installed base, and the identification of warranty savings

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