by Gary Mintchell | Jun 1, 2015 | Automation, Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, Networking, News, Operations Management, Technology
How many careers have you had?
Some may have chemical engineering or computer science degrees and are still doing process control or computer networking. But many of us have wound up with a circuitous path to where we are now. In a different industry. Or doing sales or management rather than pure engineering.
The key for career flexibility and advancement is continuous learning.
For a very long time, I’ve been concerned with the prevailing “wisdom” that education exists solely for vocational enhancement.
Here is a voice from the Silicon Valley venture capital community issuing a warning much as I would. In Hard-Core Career Advice for a 13-year-old, James Altucher notes, “[My experience] shows that school is too focused on ‘education leads to a job.’ This is not true anymore. “
He continues, “The reality is the average person has 14 different careers in their lives and the average multi-millionaire has seven different sources of income. So anything that is ‘one-job focused’ will create a generation of kids that will learn the hard way that life doesn’t work like that.”
I have always believed that education is necessary for personal growth.
There are more of my thoughts on this topic in my (mostly) weekly newsletter that went out today.
I am typing this article outside the press room on the pool deck of the Grand Hyatt in San Diego. Press room? Yes, I’m at Rockwell Automation TechED. I find myself needing to cut back on the amount of travel. In a couple of weeks, I’ll have to report on both Honeywell and Siemens from the reports of my friends. Yes, they are the same week in different parts of the country. I just couldn’t make them. But this week in San Diego worked.
Plus, this is my 9th one of these, I think. Formerly RSTechED (they like the capital d–that makes it a logo rather than text), it is now dubbed Rockwell Automation TechED. The reason is there is an expansion of training opportunities beyond the initial HMI/SCADA and programming software. It now includes information systems, new commercial technologies, and discussion of new hardware products.
Attending these events is one way professionals participate in continuous learning.
Connected Enterprise
Rockwell has maintained a consistent theme for many years–the Connected Enterprise. It is still building upon that vision. Cisco, Panduit and Microsoft remain as top-tier partners. EtherNet/IP, the Industrial IP Consortium, and mobility remain as foundations.
There will be more to contemplate this week as I have four defined interviews and many other opportunities. The connected enterprise really is a vision beyond just the Industrial Internet of Things. And Manufacturing 4.0 remains a German initiative mostly targeting Germany’s strength in machine building. I’ve been removed from the US “Smart Manufacturing” circle, but I don’t see it really have a huge impact in the market.
But smart, connected devices, machines, lines, plants, and enterprises still point to the future of manufacturing.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 30, 2015 | Automation, Internet of Things, News, Operations Management, Technology
Developing testbeds for testing development of technology extensions seems to be hot right now. The Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition has a couple going in conjunction with US government money. There is a bid out from the US government for development of some more, also related to energy efficiency.
The Industrial Internet Consortium announced its first energy-focused testbed: the Communication and Control Testbed for Microgrid Applications. Industrial Internet Consortium member organizations Real-Time Innovations (RTI), National Instruments, and Cisco, are collaborating on the project, working with power utilities CPS Energy and Southern California Edison. Additional industry collaborators include Duke Energy and the power industry organization – Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP).
I recently saw where an analyst positioned the IIC with the German Industry 4.0 initiative–while ignoring the US Smart Manufacturing group altogether. These advanced manufacturing strategies are showing some growth. Both of these have commercial technology companies solidly behind them. I would think that they will have more impact in the long run than SMLC. But we’ll see.
Here is some background from the IIC press release. “Today’s power grid relies on a central-station architecture not designed to interconnect distributed and renewable power sources such as roof-top solar and wind turbines. The system must over-generate power to compensate for rapid variation in power generation or demands. As a result, much of the benefit of renewable energy sources in neighborhoods or businesses is lost. Efficiently integrating variable and distributed generation requires architectural innovation.”
The goal of the Communication and Control Testbed is to introduce the flexibility of real-time analytics and control to increase efficiencies in this legacy process – ensuring that power is generated more accurately and reliably to match demand. This testbed proposes re-architecting electric power grids to include a series of distributed microgrids which will control smaller areas of demand with distributed generation and storage capacity.
These microgrids will operate independently from the main electric power grid but will still interact and be coordinated with the existing infrastructure.
The testbed participants will work closely with Duke Energy, which recently published a distributed intelligence reference architecture, as well as SGIP to help ensure a coordinated, accepted architecture based on modern, cross-industry industrial internet technologies.
The Communications and Control framework will be developed in three phases that will culminate in a field deployment that will take place at CPS Energy’s “Grid-of-the-Future” microgrid test area in San Antonio, Texas.
The initial phases will be tested in Southern California Edison’s Controls Lab in Westminster, CA.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 12, 2015 | Automation, News, Operations Management, Security
In years past there were as many as 10-12 companies presenting at the hours-long press conference “marathon” preceding the official beginning of the annual ARC Industry Forum in Orlando. This year, there were only five companies presenting. I’ve already written about the Honeywell announcement.
Yokogawa devoted most of its 30 minutes discussing the 100th anniversary of the company. This announcement follows along with one of the main themes of the overall conference—cyber security.
Yokogawa Electric Corp. (www.yokogawa.com) announced its collaboration with Cisco Systems Inc. to deliver Shell’s SecurePlant initiative. SecurePlant is a comprehensive security management solution for plant control systems that was jointly developed as an initiative between Cisco, a leader in the IT industry, Yokogawa, a leader in mission-critical plant automation systems, and Shell. The three companies have agreed to proceed over the next three years with the implementation of SecurePlant at around fifty Shell plants globally.
Industrial producers around the world face a wide range of operational challenges in areas such as cyber security that pose a pervasive threat to safety and availability. Most companies with global operations, however, still take a relatively simplistic plant-by-plant approach, such as implementing operating system security patches and anti-virus pattern file updates. As a result, security levels tend to vary at each plant.
In the general practice of control system security management, individual control system vendors extensively validate security patches and anti-virus pattern files to confirm that they do not interfere with system operation and then report the results to their customers for implementation. Since plants tend to use a variety of control systems and equipment from different vendors, occasionally with multi-generation platforms from a single vendor, this process is often complicated. For this reason, plants increasingly have the need for plant-wide integrated services that take a more holistic and efficient approach to the management of system security.
With the aim of standardizing security practices at Shell plants around the world and minimizing control system vulnerability, Yokogawa and Cisco collaborated on the design of the SecurePlant service and will jointly provide deployment and operational services.
The SecurePlant solution is designed as a standard solution that consists of the delivery of OS patches and anti-virus pattern files for control systems and the provision of real time and proactive monitoring of solution delivery, as well as a help desk operation to manage this solution.
Supplier-certified Windows security patches and virus signature files are distributed from a SecureCenter to the SecureSite at each plant via Shell’s existing global network. The real time and proactive monitoring capabilities enable the centralized management of plant security. A customer help desk operated jointly by Yokogawa and Cisco is available 24/7/365 to manage solution related incidents.
Moving forward, Yokogawa and Cisco will continue to offer comprehensive security solutions involving the deployment, operation, and monitoring of control system environments. These services are applicable to plants of all sizes in a wide variety of industries, including facilities spread out over a large geographic area. In addition, both companies will leverage their technologies and experience to develop deep industrial automation (IA) solutions such as remote system maintenance, remote plant asset management and Big Data on the top of a secure remote access platform to help companies in making faster decisions, reducing total cost of ownership (TCO), and achieving operational excellence.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 29, 2014 | Industrial Computers, Manufacturing IT, Networking, Operations Management, Security, Technology
During media interviews (more accurately mini-presentations) in November at Rockwell Automation’s media/analyst day “Automation Perspectives,” Sr. VP and CTO Sujeet Chand met with us individually along with several managers from Cisco Systems to discuss cyber security. This marks at least the third year where Chand’s role was to explain the Cisco/Rockwell relationship.
I’ve been thinking about the presentation for the past couple of weeks (OK, except for during Christmas). When they broached the idea of cyber security, I jumped to a conclusion about how thinking about security would lead engineers to more thoroughly thinking about their overall network leading to overall improvement in manufacturing.
What they seemed to be actually saying was much less than that. The message seems to have been about engineers should actually begin thinking about their network architecture.
Suddenly it dawned on me what the problem was that they were trying to solve. Automation engineers are evidently just cobbling together Ethernet networks in their processes and factories with no thought of network cyber security. But they will start—and buy some Cisco/Rockwell managed switches and security services. (Sorry, I don’t mean for that sound cynical. What they do is sell products and services to help their customers succeed.)
There has been NO thought to cyber security!?
They evidently thought that even with the several years of intense media coverage of security holes in SCADA and other processes engineers were still not taking security into account.
If that is true, then we truly need the new generation of computer/networking/security-savvy engineers (millennials?) now.
Thinking ahead
I know that one of my problems is jumping ahead. Companies will show me a new product, and I’ll immediately start thinking of all the uses and potential additions.
Any engineer who has not been building in some defense in depth and getting help from IT about security policies needs to be trained or replaced. We’ve known about this for at least five years.
Going back to re-engineer (or engineer intentionally for the first time) the factory network, should lead to significant improvements in the automation system, information flow, and ultimately manufacturing profits.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 3, 2014 | Automation, Networking, Operations Management, Technology
You cannot attend a Rockwell Automation event and escape an industrial Ethernet discussion. This year’s Automation Fair was no exception. I met with Sr. VP and CTO Sujeet Chand and a host of Cisco people for a half-hour to discuss networking technology and the health of the Cisco/Rockwell partnership (it’s healthy, by the way).
This year we discussed a lot of wireless. And one announcement from the event was the release of a white paper/design and implementation guide, “Deploying 802.11 Wireless LAN Technology within a Converged Plantwide Ethernet Architecture.” The detailed design guidance is designed to help control system engineers, IT network engineers, and system integrators implement standard, IP-based wireless networks in a more robust, secure and scalable way.
The guide provides in-depth information on 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) solutions within a “Converged Plantwide Ethernet” (CPwE) architecture, including design considerations for fixed position, nomadic and mobile equipment use cases. It also includes explanations for how to configure, maintain and troubleshoot WLAN for each use case, and detailed documentation on how the architectures were tested and validated by Cisco and Rockwell Automation. With this new resource, network designers can create a small network within a plant using a single autonomous access point, and scale up to create a larger, unified WLAN architecture.
“Wireless has an increasingly important role in the industrial network infrastructure,” said Ashok Patel, network architect at Owens Corning, the world’s largest manufacturer of fiberglass technology. “Managing both data collection and automation control over 802.11 is viable today if you understand and deploy the architecture and design best practices outlined in the new resources from Rockwell Automation and Cisco.”
“Wi-Fi networks (or IEEE 802.11) are incredibly useful in factory and plant applications – so useful that manufacturers must thoughtfully plan their Wi-Fi networks as an infrastructure serving all types of applications,” said Harry Forbes, senior analyst, ARC. “This new and timely resource from Rockwell Automation and Cisco incorporates lessons that many manufacturers learned through experience.”
Rockwell Automation and Cisco are committed to being one of the most valuable resources in the industry for helping manufacturers improve business performance by bridging the technical and cultural gaps between plant-floor automation and higher-level information systems. Through successful collaboration on products, services, validated architectures and educational resources, the two companies help manufacturers converge their network infrastructure, and bring together IT and operations using a secure, IP-based network to help drive the vision of The Connected Enterprise.
