Salesforce Another Meeting of IT and OT

Salesforce Another Meeting of IT and OT

Here I go to yet another IT conference to talk convergence and platform. Salesforce invited me to its summer marketing conference in June and promised an interview with a Vice President. I could take my wife out to a good anniversary dinner, visit family, and go to a tech conference with a good interview all on one trip. Too good to pass up.

This was the Salesforce Connections conference. Not as big as Dreamforce in San Francisco, but still quite large by our standards in manufacturing.

Salesforce is more than the CRM company it was. Many acquisitions later, it has assembled an array of technology. Like all tech companies, it has a platform. In fact due to its open APIs, you could use it, too. Some time ago, I interviewed the CEO of a manufacturing ERP company called Kenandy that was build upon the Salesforce platform. Rootstriker, another ERP company build on the Salesforce platform, recently acquired Kenandy.

Featured in one keynote was an application by MTD, a manufacturer of lawn tractors (Cub Cadet, etc.). No, Salesforce doesn’t run machines. It does help connect the manufacturer with its end customers and then with its dealers with feedback to the manufacturer.

The idea is that customers do online research and so need to be reached in many ways (thus Salesforce marketing). MTD erected an online store on the Salesforce platform (in simplified terms) for direct to the consumer interaction. An order is fulfilled by the local dealer. The dealer still gets margin and relationship and as an extra added bonus, the opportunity for service business. Linking all back to MTD, it gets to know the customer, satisfies the dealer, plus receiving data from the service business feeds back into product development.

Achyut Jajoo, Salesforce VP automotive/manufacturing, told me industry is moving from product centric to system, e.g., autonomous vehicles, mobility services, digital signals; factory automation, geographic expansion, intelligence, vehicle sales. Mobility services lead to transaction service—over air updates, location based services.

He noted that people start online and mostly know what they want before visiting a dealer. Other manufacturing customers tying their whole sales systems back to manufacturing include John Deere and Ecolab.

“State of the Connected Customer” report

Before I went to the conference, Saleforce sent me this interesting report—a survey of over 6,700 consumers and business buyers worldwide that looks at the ever changing landscape of customers’ expectations, the emerging technologies influencing these expectations and the role trust plays in the customer experience.

Customers today are energized by tech innovations — but also plagued by deepening distrust of the companies that provide them. They have high expectations about what makes a great customer experience, and not a lot of patience for companies that fail to deliver.

These trends impact every company, regardless of whether they sell to consumers or business buyers purchasing on behalf of their companies. In this research, “customers” is an aggregate of both consumer and business buyer responses.

The report dives into the nuances of this tricky customer landscape. Here are five of the high-level findings our research brought to light:

1. Customer experience matters even more than you think

Eighty percent of customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. A majority take this sentiment a step further by voting with their wallets; 57% have stopped buying from a company because a competitor provided a better experience.

2. B2B expectations mirror B2C standards

The concept of “B2Me” isn’t new, but it’s gathering steam. Eighty-two percent of business buyers want the same experience as when they’re buying for themselves. But only 27% say companies generally excel at meeting their standards for an overall B2B experience, signaling ample room to improve.

3. Companies face new connected mandates

For 84% of customers, being treated like a person — and not a number — is very important to win their business. Another 70% say connected processes are very important to win their business (such as seamless handoffs between departments and channels, or contextualized engagement based on earlier interactions).

Even before a purchase, personalization is hugely important; 59% of customers say tailored engagement based on past interactions is very important to win their business.

While they buy, 78% of business buyers seek salespeople that act as trusted advisors with knowledge of their needs and industry.

4. Technology sets new benchmarks for innovation

Real innovation, not lip service, is a deciding factor for most customers. 56% of customers (including 66% of business buyers) actively seek to buy from the most innovative companies.

While some emerging technologies are only starting to take root, a majority of customers say these technologies have transformed (or are actively transforming) their expectations: the Internet of Things (60%), voice-activated personal assistants (59%), and AI (51%).

5. Facing a crisis of trust: finding the balance between personalization and privacy

Sixty-two percent of customers say they’re more afraid of their data being compromised now than they were two years ago — and nearly half of customers (45%) feel confused about how companies use their data.

82% of customers will share relevant information about themselves in exchange for connections between their digital and in-person experiences.

81% of customers will share relevant information about themselves in exchange for more consultative help from salespeople.

85% of customers will share relevant information about themselves in exchange for proactive customer service.

For 92% of customers, the ability to control what personal information is collected makes them more likely to trust a company with that information.

Salesforce Another Meeting of IT and OT

84% of industrial companies face gap between IoT and ERP

There are two types of people in industry—operations technology and information technology. God forbid if they should actually talk with each other.

Everywhere I go there is talk of overcoming the OT/IT divide. Something just crossed my email stream where there was a survey about whether the departments have merged anywhere. They were shocked, shocked I say, that only about 1 in 10 companies have merged the two departments. I think the purveyors of that survey must have been on Mars for the past bunch of years.

These people just have different jobs to do. Different things they are measured on. Different ways they contribute to the common welfare of the corporation. However, the technologies they use are overlapping at an ever greater pace.

Here is a survey that once again reveals what is seemingly a disconnect between IT and OT. But I think that interfacing to ERP systems is non-trivial. I’m actually amazed and heartened by the progress we’ve made to date.

I’d take a look at this survey and consider how far we have come—and yet, how far we still need to go.

IFS has released a primary research study on how the Internet of Things (IoT) affects readiness for digital transformation in industrial companies.

According to survey of 200 IoT decision makers at industrial companies in North America, only 16 percent of respondents consume IoT data in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. That means 84 percent of industrial companies face a disconnect between data from connected devices and strategic decision making and operations, limiting the digital transformation potential of IoT.

The study posed questions about companies’ degree of IoT sophistication. The study also explores how well their enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise asset management (EAM) or field service management (FSM)software prepares them for digital transformation and to consume IoT data within enterprise software.

Respondents were divided into groups including IoT Leaders and IoT Laggards, depending on how well their enterprise software prepared them to consume IoT data—as well as Digital Transformation Leaders and Digital Transformation Laggards depending on how well their enterprise software prepared them for digital transformation.

The two Leaders groups overlapped, with 88 percent of Digital Transformation Leaders also qualifying as IoT Leaders, suggesting IoT is a technology that underpins the loose concept of digital transformation.
Digital Transformation Leaders made more complete use of IoT data than Digital Transformation Laggards; Leaders are almost three times as likely to use IoT data for corporate business intelligence or to monitor performance against service level agreements.

Digital Transformation Leaders were more likely than Digital Transformation Laggards to be able to access IoT data in applications used beyond the plant floor. They were more than four times as lilkely to have access to IoT data in enterprise asset management software, twice as likely than Digital Transformation Laggards to be able to access IoT data in high-value asset performance management software, and almost twice as likely to be able to be able to use IoT data in ERP.

The data suggests a real need for more IoT-enabled enterprise applications designed to put data from networks of connected devices into the context of the business.

In reviewing the findings, IFS Chief Technology Officer for North America, Rick Veague, commented, “Are your planning and maintenance systems robust enough to make real time decisions using IoT-sourced data? Many are facing the reality of having to answer ‘no.’ ”

“Study data suggest that the most common use case for IoT in these industrial settings is condition-based maintenance. The benefits go beyond operational improvements and maintenance cost avoidance,” said Ralph Rio, Vice President of Enterprise Software at ARC Advisory Group. “It increases uptime that provides additional capacity for increased revenue. It also avoids unplanned downtime that interrupts production schedules causing missed shipment dates and customer satisfaction issues. When married to demand and scheduling systems in ERP, IoT becomes a revenue-enhancement tool improving the top line.”

 

Salesforce Another Meeting of IT and OT

Can IT Do Automation?

I wrote about FoxConn building a plant (maybe) in Wisconsin.

“Retired” Rockwell Automation Communications Director John Bernaden commented on my LinkedIn post of the article:

Good perspective Gary Mintchell. FoxConn’s been trying to replace its Chinese workers with automation and robotics for several years now with limited success. They’re realizing what’s no surprise to you — advanced systems integration of complex connected enterprises is extremely difficult. But FoxConn like too many at traditional IT companies underestimate these challenges and difficulties. In a related example, top Apple execs invited Rockwell’s CTO to a meeting in Cupertino a few years ago where they informed him that Apple planned to develop its own factory automation systems. Rockwell’s CTO literally laughed at their naïveté and politely left. Similarly Google acquired seven industrial robotics companies bragging in big New York Times articles about their X Division plan to produce armies of industrial robots. However they’ve quietly now sold or spun off most those industrial Robotics companies. The bottom line is that IT giants like Apple, Google, and FoxConn need traditional discrete automation companies like Rockwell, Siemens, GE and others to be successful.

John raises interesting points. IT programming often has some similar terminology to industrial automation—control loops, input/output, timers, and so forth. But the specific underlying technologies of industrial sensors and transmitters, industrial controllers, deterministic messaging, and the like make things much different.

I have been getting many behind the scenes looks at what Dell Technologies has been doing with Internet of Things in an industrial setting with its gateways and partnerships. Monday will find me in Houston, Texas, at a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) event looking at what HPE is doing in the same arena.

These IT companies have formulated a strategy of working from IT (CIO) down to the factory floor, whereas Rockwell Automation and Siemens are pursuing a similar end game with a strategy beginning in the plant and working up to enterprise.

This middle ground is the new battlefield.

Connecting the enterprise is where the action exists at this time. That’s why I named my blog The Manufacturing Connection.

Watch next week as I update what HPE is up to and catch up with someone I had several great conversations with while he was at National Instruments discussing Big Analog Data—Dr. Tom Bradicich.

EdgeX Foundry Unifies the IoT Marketplace to Accelerate Enterprise IoT Deployments

EdgeX Foundry Unifies the IoT Marketplace to Accelerate Enterprise IoT Deployments

The Linux Foundation announced launch of EdgeX Foundry, an open source software project to build a common open framework for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing and an ecosystem of interoperable components that will unify the marketplace and accelerate enterprise and Industrial IoT. The goal is the simplification and standardization of Industrial IoT edge computing, while still allowing the ecosystem to add significant value.

Looks like the big news is that Dell has joined and turned its Project Fuse set of IoT building blocks over to the open source project.

The press release, like most that deal with software, was long on buzz words and short on specifics that we all love to see. I have meetings this week in Hannover and expect to learn more. Watch for end-of-the-week updates.

Project Fuse? I did some research.

Back in December, 2015, Dell’s IoT director of strategy and partnerships Jason Shepherd told me that things were too complex trying to tie all the different ways to communicate through, for example, and IoT Gateway edge device. He also added these predictions for 2016. They seem to fit with the announcement.

  1. Enterprise will become the largest market for IoT adoption—While the Internet of Things hype reached its peak in the consumer markets this past year, 2016 will be the year of IoT in the enterprise market. Currently, we are seeing a slump in sales for the once buzzworthy, consumer IoT devices, such as fitness trackers, whereas just the opposite is happening for commercial IoT products. As companies begin understanding the value of IoT (return on investments, efficiency, productivity, etc.), commercial IoT solutions will gain traction and the enterprise will emerge as the largest market for IoT adoption.
  2. Standardization and interoperability of IoT technology will become a focal point—As IoT solutions become a mainstay for enterprises and consumers alike, the industry will face growing pressure for standardization and interoperability. As a result, an increasing number of industry players will begin uniting under the common goal of establishing a set of standards for IoT. These standards bodies and consortiums will make solid progress in 2016 but it is unlikely they will decide upon a finalized set of standards in the coming year. Rather, 2016 will be a year for critical industry-wide conversation that will help to drive the awareness of and need for standardization and interoperability.

Then I found this blog by Stacey Higginbotham, Dell plans an open source IoT stack, from last October.

I met with Jason Shepherd, director of IoT strategy and partnerships with Dell, who told me about its efforts to bring a modular set of building blocks to the industrial internet. It’s called Project Fuse, and Dell plans to make the effort open source.

Dell is working with 30 other “big name” companies that Shepherd didn’t name to create a layer of technologies that will sit between the many different messaging protocols used by today’s sensor networks and the cloud and analytics layer (see photo).

To me, this looks like it could cause problems for some of the middleware software vendors that currently do a lot of the heavy lifting for clients trying to integrate various systems, but Shepherd says some of them are on board because a platform like Project Fuse means they don’t have to build each client’s integration from scratch.

 

Leaders of this initiative believe there is too much fragmentation and the lack of a common IoT solution framework. This complexity hinders broad adoption and stalling market growth.

“Success in Internet of Things is dependent on having a healthy ecosystem that can deliver interoperability and drive digital transformation,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation. “EdgeX Foundry is aligning market leaders around a common framework, which will drive IoT adoption and enable businesses to focus on developing innovative use cases that impact the bottom line.”

Unifying the IoT Market

EdgeX Foundry is designed to unify the marketplace around a common open framework and build an ecosystem of companies offering interoperable plug-and-play components. “Designed to run on any hardware or operating system and with any combination of application environments, EdgeX can quickly and easily deliver interoperability between connected devices, applications, and services, across a wide range of use cases,” states the release. Interoperability between community-developed software will be maintained through a certification program.

Dell is seeding EdgeX Foundry with its FUSE source code base under Apache 2.0. The contribution consists of more than a dozen microservices and over 125,000 lines of code and was architected with feedback from hundreds of technology providers and end users to facilitate interoperability between existing connectivity standards and commercial value-add such as edge analytics, security, system management and services. This is complemented by the recent merger of the IoTX project into the EdgeX effort, which was previously supported by EdgeX Foundry members including Two Bulls and Beechwoods Software, among others. Additional supporting code contributions by EdgeX members are already underway.

“One of the key factors holding back IoT designs in the enterprise is that there are too many choices to safely and easily implement a system that will provide a return on investment in a reasonable timeframe,” said Mike Krell, Lead IoT Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “EdgeX Foundry will fundamentally change the market dynamic by allowing enterprise IoT applications to choose from a myriad of best-in-class software, hardware and services providers based on their specific needs.”

Founding members include: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Alleantia, Analog Devices, Bayshore Networks, Beechwoods Software, Canonical, ClearBlade, CloudPlugs, Cloud of Things, Cumulocity, Davra Networks, Dell, Eigen Innovations, EpiSensor, FogHorn Systems, ForgeRock, Great Bay Software, IMS Evolve, IOTech, IoTium, KMC Controls, Kodaro, Linaro, MachineShop, Mobiliya, Mocana, Modius, NetFoundry, Neustar, Opto 22, relayr, RevTwo, RFMicron, Sight Machine, SoloInsight, Striim, Switch Automation, Two Bulls, V5 Systems, Vantiq and ZingBox. Industry affiliate members include: Cloud Foundry Foundation, EnOcean Alliance, Mainflux, Object Management Group, Project Haystack and ULE Alliance. 

“Businesses currently have to invest a lot of time and energy into developing their own edge computing solutions, before they can even deploy IoT solutions to address business challenges,” said Philip DesAutels, PhD Senior Director of IoT at The Linux Foundation and Executive Director of EdgeX Foundry. “EdgeX will foster an ecosystem of interoperable components from a variety of vendors, so that resources can be spent on driving business value instead of combining and integrating IoT components.”

Adopting an open source edge software platform benefits the entire IoT ecosystem:

  • End customers can deploy IoT edge solutions quickly and easily with the flexibility to dynamically adapt to changing business needs;
  • Hardware Manufacturers can scale faster with an interoperable partner ecosystem and more robust security and system management;
  • Independent Software Vendors can benefit from interoperability with 3rd party applications and hardware without reinventing connectivity;
  • Sensor/Device Makers can write an application-level device driver with a selected protocol once using the SDK and get pull from all solution providers;
  • System Integrators can get to market faster with plug-and-play ingredients combined with their own proprietary inventions.

The Linux Foundation will establish a governance and membership structure for EdgeX Foundry to nurture a vibrant technical community. A Governing Board will guide business decisions, marketing and ensure alignment between the technical communities and members. The technical steering committee will provide leadership on the code merge and guide the technical direction of the project.

“We think EdgeX Foundry is the key to accelerating the fragmented IoT market and are proud to have been a part of the effort from the beginning,” said Jason Shepherd, IoT Strategy and Partnerships, Dell. “We’re big believers in openness and choice, and this modular architecture is designed to help anyone easily build edge computing solutions with preferred hardware, software, standards and services while minimizing reinvention. EdgeX Foundry is not a new standard, rather a software platform to unify standards and edge applications.” 

EdgeX Foundry is an open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation building a common open framework for IoT edge computing and an ecosystem of interoperable components that unifies the marketplace and accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions. Designed to run on any hardware or operating system and with any combination of application environments, the EdgeX enables developers to quickly create flexible IoT edge solutions that can easily adapt to changing business needs. To learn more, visit: www.edgexfoundry.org.

 

 

EdgeX Foundry Unifies the IoT Marketplace to Accelerate Enterprise IoT Deployments

Cloud Application Connects Disparate Traceability Systems Within Company

Easy way to use the cloud to connect traceability applications from different suppliers across these increasingly complex industrial companies? I received another of those press releases that seem almost too good to be true. So I called the company.

The application uses open APIs, proprietary connectors, and other such technologies to tap into all the different databases. But the key points are easy to set up and use as well as easily bring relevant data to the person who needs it.

Leading2Lean, a cloud-based lean manufacturing solutions provider, introduced TraceCloud, a CloudDISPATCH engine designed to identify possible manufacturing problems across disparate systems in different plants. TraceCloud eliminates the cost and risk of removing existing traceability systems and replacing them with a standardized system across all plants—an expense of upwards of tens of millions of dollars.

It’s common for companies to use different traceability systems for each of its plants. Discovering issues and tracking them across various systems can take days and tie up precious IT resources ultimately needed in other areas. Some discovery processes may even include shutting down production. With TraceCloud, companies can access aggregated data from multiple systems and find issues in just minutes.

When a problem is detected—because of a faulty product, for example—TraceCloud is able to quickly alert production teams about the problem, and allow for quick access to the data necessary to identify the root cause. Manufacturers can then contain the suspect material, ultimately preventing the quality issue from being perpetuated or shipped. Once the system has contained the material, TraceCloud enables quick decision-making based on facts and data collected from systems at various production plants and even suppliers.

“TraceCloud is drastically cutting the time to identify, solve and contain quality problems, saving companies millions of dollars,” said Keith Barr, CEO of Leading2Lean.

TraceCloud offers seven key components:

  • Traceability and genealogy: Manufacturers can trace all the way through source material to make decisions based on facts. TraceCloud brings simplicity to creating a complete birth certificate of your products, both serialized or lot based.
  • Unites existing systems: TraceCloud combines data from multiple systems and sites, enabling easy standardization and eliminating the need for costly replacement of current systems in existing or newly acquired plants.
  • Ease of use: No need to make requests to IT. Simply go into TraceCloud’s easy, point-and-click, intuitive system and get the answer back in minutes from the convenience of your office. TraceCloud enables quality engineers to easily identify opportunities for improvement much more quickly.
  • Alerting and containment: With TraceCloud, you can notify all relevant parties upon discovering a lot-based or serialized issue. The system will identify the location of all corresponding product issues, and contain the faulty product.
  • Dynamic data collection: Leading2Lean’s dynamic-schema architecture lets manufacturers collect variable data length and type, as well as counting to extend product trace detail to any degree desired. Collect machines used, participating operators, settings or readings in the process, and combine bill-of-materials (BOM) from both serialized or lot to create the complete genealogy tree.
  • Eleven9s: Leading2Lean performs above industry benchmarks, with Eleven9s durability of historical data. Traceability data is kept above safety standards with little to no risk of data loss.
  • Year-Long-Term data storage: Maintain your data for 20-plus years. TraceCloud maintains your data for as long as needed, and the system allows anyone to retrieve data instantly when required.

 

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