by Gary Mintchell | Jan 11, 2016 | Asset Performance Management, Automation, Internet of Things, Operations Management, Technology
Remote monitoring and diagnostics is a key driver for the Internet of Things strategy adoption in manufacturing and production. Advances in both the technology and services involved in this area appears to be the area of best economic return these days.
Rockwell Automation recently released news about its take on a diagnostic reliability service. Rockwell doesn’t tie it to the Internet of Things, much to its credit. But this solution fits within the broad trend I’ve seen developing.
The solution deploys a layer of technology across plant devices and equipment to monitor and perform analysis, and create a continuous improvement approach to reliability maintenance, reducing operational risk. As part of the service, a Rockwell Automation domain service expert also closely tracks equipment performance to advise on reliability improvements to the production facility.
“Our customers have access to a huge amount of data within their assets, but they often struggle to turn data into useful operational intelligence,” said Ryan Williams, product manager, Rockwell Automation. “In the past, companies relied on maintenance personnel on-site to check the status of equipment in the field and then develop corrective action plans. Now, with the diagnostic reliability service, they can transform maintenance data into asset intelligence. This helps build a more Connected Enterprise, leveraging interconnected data systems and producing actionable information. Companies can better prioritize choices on maintenance and production, and do more with less.”
The solution automatically collects identity and health data from all networked devices on the production control network. The data is then modeled with asset management information to trigger events and send alerts to necessary personnel for proactive maintenance. With the service, Rockwell Automation asset reliability professionals assist users in applying the intelligence on their critical equipment to inform data-driven maintenance decisions and increase productivity.
Case in diagnostics
Case in point: A major oil and gas company used the diagnostic reliability solution to help centralize information gathering and monitor hundreds of critical control assets across a California rural valley. The company also needed inventory of all the field devices in its process control network for a companywide cybersecurity policy. The automated identification and monitoring solution helped the company’s California business unit comply with the new corporate policy, reduce costs associated with field service manpower through proactive maintenance, and increase its daily oil production.
Through integrated, automated device identification and tracking, other customers using the diagnostic reliability service can realize approximately 70 percent reduction in manual data-collection time.
The diagnostic reliability offering is applicable to all manufacturers, with an industry emphasis including oil and gas, mining metals and cement, auto tire and rubber, and consumer packaged goods.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 8, 2016 | Asset Performance Management, Automation, Data Management, Operations Management
I chatted this week with two executives from GE Digital. Jeremiah Stone is the General Manager – Industrial Data Intelligence Software at GE Digital, and Jennifer Bennett is the General Manager – Manufacturing Software Solutions (Brilliant Factory) at GE Digital.
The conversation opened with the idea that it’s about data. Companies must become data-driven. But then it’s also beyond data. Not all data sets are equal. And it’s not just about finding anomalies–it’s really about finding that data and anomalies that matter most to business success.
Then we went a direction that I’ve never gone with GE before–remote monitoring and diagnostics (RM&D) targeted to reliability engineers. The often overlooked skillset of reliability engineers, and how their knowledge offers a distinct competitive advantage to companies battling it out in the industrial market.
As the advantages from unlocking big data insights continue to benefit enterprises of all sizes, data scientists – the gatekeepers and analysts of this data – have become an increasingly popular career choice. In fact, The Harvard Business Review proclaimed data scientists to be “the sexiest job of the 21st century.” But with more advanced Remote Monitoring and Diagnosis (RM&D) technologies being utilized to find and address problems before they happen, reducing the costs of planned and unplanned downtime, the emerging industrial superstars are reliability engineers.
This list summarizes our conversation:
- RM&D in the cloud uncovers the gap of reliability-centered maintenance and operations. This new technology shines a light on an old problem for customers– frustrations around the fact that they’re not able to executive consistently on maintenance and operations.
- Successful asset monitoring is more than just software. Organizations have a false sense of security that if they install monitoring software, they instantly have a handle on their operations. But the real secret in handling the complexity that monitoring creates with RM&D is the reliability engineers that can run and interpret the technology.
- Identifying anomalies in RM&D is not the problem. Identifying anomalies that matter to operations is the problem. RM&D create numerous alerts so it’s hard for an organization to know which ones to really focus on. Reliability engineers have the expertise to shift through the notifications and identify false positives, telling their organizations which ones to ignore and which ones to pay attention to.
- Cloud-based business strategy is becoming less about technology and more about knowledge sharing. The benefits of utilizing cloud technology are increasingly becoming centered on the fact that organizations can internally share and learn from a pooled knowledge base, no matter the location. The cloud offers a way for reliability engineers to capture and preserve knowledge that is crucial to the business’s ongoing success.
Stone said that this idea ties in to GE’s strategy itself. As disciples of Deming, the company is data driven, and a lot of that means remote monitoring and diagnostics for GE’s fleet. Incorporating technologies such as those from the SmartSignal acquisition, company engineers and managers are now excited. With the RM&D, they now can execute on goals, avoid failure, achieve greater reliability, and be more proactive. “Now we are excited to bring tools we use to the rest of the industrial world.”
Today’s RM&D enables excellence in manufacturing from a larger, systemic view, in order to deliver business advances, added Stone. Now engineers and managers can look at the entire scope/span of problem, not just one process or loop. “We help companies on the journey beginning with an assessment of where they are and what they want to achieve. We offer professional services to help them figure out what are outcomes they want to achieve. Not just getting connected to get data but doing it in a way that makes sense.”
Bennett pointed to the variety and complexity of data. “The problem has been all data has been in silos, but the value is upstream and downstream. Some challenges in manufacturing are often quite complex. Data flows from contexts requiring tracking back to cause. The platform we’re building on Predix brings data together. We can make insightful decisions. In RM&D we’re looking at history records, maintenance records, and the like. In the past we relied on people who have knowledge and experience for data. Now we can combine and analyze.”
We started discussing workforce and the challenges of recruiting and retaining younger people. Stone noted that young people today are looking for autonomy, mastery, and purpose. “What was magic 20 years ago isn’t now. We find a sense of curiosity in new people and a desire for a job with meaningful impact.”
One improvement in the job situation is the ability to spend more time problem solving and less time gathering data. According to studies, a typical data and analytics project required 80% of the time just collecting and collating data. Stone noted, “Our focus is on dramatically minimizing amount of time to get the data so people can start moving toward problem solving and analytics. Traditionally reliability engineers have been frustrated by availability of data. We are talking about taking it from calendar time to wrist watch time. Then we give collaborative capability. Both newer and more senior engineers are delighted with this new possibility to spend more time problem solving.”
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 1, 2015 | Automation, Technology
I have been writing on notifications in a personal sense. Here is an application of predictive notifications in manufacturing/production industry from ABB.
A new white paper that shows how predictive maintenance and notification technology can be combined to enable services that predict events that affect production, and then accelerate actions to avoid or exploit the events in order to produce higher equipment availability, more stable process performance and better product quality.
The white paper, entitled, “Are You on Track? How Predictive Notification Keeps Production on Track,” notes that though notifications are all around us (think smart phones with notifications for appointments, social media, software updates, sports scores, stock prices etc.), they haven’t yet entered the realm of industrial production. The paper proposes that the reason is because most notifications tell what has already happened. But combining notification technology with predictive maintenance technology can create a solution in which notifications become part of the daily industrial plant work practice.
“We have long provided control technology that triggers alarms for certain scenarios,” said Dan Duncan, Vice President, Sales and Operations for ABB Process Automation Service. “And we also deliver services that can automatically identify, categorize and prioritize maintenance issues that should be addressed. Both of these technological developments have made a huge impact on global industrial production.
“But what has been missing from our toolset is a simple way to take what is identified, categorized and prioritized by these advanced services technologies, and quickly and efficiently put an action into the hands of someone who can actually do something about it now,” Duncan said. “This white paper represents our thinking on how this can be accomplished by industrial producers everywhere.
“We expect it to have a significant beneficial effect on improving production efficiencies,” he said.
The paper covers predictive maintenance technology, problems with historical predictive approach and how to resolve those problems. The paper further identifies the value that can be produced by predictive notification technologies, and outlines a path to implementing a predictive notification program, including step-by-step guidance on how to get there.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 9, 2015 | Automation, Security
Industrial Control Systems cybersecurity discussions often spill over from trade press to mainstream media. An incident in a large plant leads to economic and human consequences drawing interest from the big media companies.
A company called NexDefense formed an ICS Cybersecurity Fellows Program. Together with NexDefense, the Fellows will help educate and raise awareness of contemporary cybersecurity issues facing industry’s critical control systems that tirelessly operate in critical infrastructure facilities around the world.
In addition, Eric Byres, co-founder and former chief technology officer of Tofino Security (acquired by Belden Inc. in 2011) and leading expert in the field of process control and SCADA system cybersecurity, joins NexDefense as a strategic technology advisor and Senior Fellow to help further develop the company’s technology offerings and raise the attention level of cyber risks affecting industry.
“The NexDefense Industrial Cybersecurity Fellows Program assembles highly recognizable and well respected industrial security practitioners, consultants and advisors and allows each to speak as part of a larger cohesive unit,” said Doug Wylie, CISSP, vice president product marketing and strategy at NexDefense. “We are privileged to bring together some of the great cybersecurity minds of industry, each of whom share a common objective with NexDefense to expand business and community visibility and recognition of important security trends, emerging risks and techniques that can help to counteract threats to the safety and operational integrity of many industrial control systems.”
Members of the NexDefense Fellows Program will independently share their professional perspectives on security topics relevant to the ICS industry, including how security risks to industrial control systems can be reduced or avoided altogether through whitepapers, articles, blogs, social media and speaking engagements sponsored by NexDefense.
Joining the Fellows program are four highly reputable industrial cybersecurity authorities, each of whom continue to have a positive and meaningful affect on industry and provide control system owners and operators and the public at large with expert perspectives on cybersecurity for automation and control systems:
Eric Byres, SCADA and ICS Security Product Visionary, President Byres Security Consulting, ISA Fellow, Co-Founder and former CTO of Tofino Security—“Every digital system on which we depend has become an integral part of our connected world. This is especially true for the many industrial control systems (ICS) that produce power, move clean water and manufacture goods. The NexDefense Fellows Program will serve as a useful outlet to discuss the positive and negative consequences of today’s hyper-connectivity to these critical systems.” Eric added, “In my role as NexDefense Strategic Technical Advisor and Senior Fellow, I look forward to working closely with the team to address industry-wide security challenges with innovative solutions that can have a valuable effect on reliability, safety and productivity of control systems.”
Michael Chipley, PhD., President, The PMC Group, consultant and respected contributor to NIST cybersecurity guidelines and best practices including the Cybersecurity Framework and SP 800-82 R2—“Connected devices are at the core of building automation subsystems that provide services such as fire and physical security protection, heating and ventilation and automated lighting control, all of which are actively converging with business enterprise and industrial control systems. Cybersecurity as it relates to systems-of-systems is a topic that increasingly affects everyone and commands greater visibility with the public.”
Eric Cornelius, Director of Critical Infrastructure and Industrial Control Systems (ICS), Cylance, previously Deputy Director, Control Systems Security Program, US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—“Electronic Perimeters alone cannot adequately protect control systems from attackers intent on stealing data, damaging equipment, or compromising the process itself. The NexDefense Fellows program will help open up discussions on security issues to more people from industry, raising awareness of what can be done to better protect people and processes from harm.”
Bryan Singer, Principal Investigator, Kenexis Consulting Corporation, and former Chairman ISA99—“The most successful industrial automation risk management programs are built on a foundation that recognizes safety and security are inextricably linked. While only a few companies have truly embraced this philosophy to date, others are still struggling with where to start. NexDefense’s Cybersecurity Fellows program will be a valuable opportunity to share and discuss risk management concepts like this with a broader audience.”
Each NexDefense Fellow will deliver their messages through a variety of mediums, with the intention to reach the public and private sectors and raise security awareness about the importance of expanded investment in the design, operation and maintenance of critical control systems around the world.
by Gary Mintchell | Oct 26, 2015 | Internet of Things, News, Operations Management
When Michael Dell turned the focus to new products and initiatives during his Dell World keynote last week, the first product mentioned was an Internet of Things (IoT) device.
Dell provides servers (for cloud storage), software, and analytics engines that provide the end point for the IoT ecosystem. This device, Edge Gateway 5000 series, takes Dell’s offering to the other side of the ecosystem—closer to the edge device.
Companies in the automation software space have talked for years about having meetings with operation technology (OT) professionals and bringing in information technology (IT) professionals—often the first time the two groups have met.
Dell is spinning the same story. It is strong on the IT side, but it is not a stranger to OT. Well, it is also trying to be the catalyzing force to bring IT and OT to the same table.
Some highlights:
• Edge Gateway 5000 Series delivers purpose-built gateway with analytics capabilities, expansive input/output (I/O) options, and ability to operate in extreme environments
• Solution designed for rigors of building and factory automation sectors; signals Dell’s deep partnerships with operational and information technology organizations, including OSIsoft
• Dell Edge Gateway adds to industry’s broadest portfolio of IoT assets, spanning newly revamped Dell Statistica advanced analytics, hardware, digital services and security and manageability software
Dell announced the launch of the new Edge Gateway 5000 Series purpose-built for the building and factory automation sectors. Composed of an industrial-grade form factor, expanded input and output interfaces, and with wide operating temperature ranges, the product, combined with data analytics capabilities, promises to give companies an edge computing solution alternative to today’s costly, proprietary IoT offerings.
Making good decisions using data generated by sensors is the central objective of IoT. Yet the rich data generated by IoT devices presents its own set of challenges. Harbor Research estimates that by 2020 smart systems will create over 194 petabytes of data. The sheer volume and complexity of managing this new decentralized, localized data can quickly overload traditional environments and analysis tools. Edge analytics, carried out with the help of versatile gateways, will help with this data overload by determining what data needs to be acted on quickly and then filtered or stored.
The Dell Edge Gateway sits at the edge of the network (near the devices and sensors) with local analytics and other middleware to receive, aggregate, analyze and relay data, then minimizes expensive bandwidth by relaying only meaningful data to the cloud or datacenter. Thanks to new Dell Statistica data analytics also announced today, Dell is expanding capabilities out to the gateway. This means companies can now extend the benefits of cloud computing to their network edge and for faster and more secure business insights while saving on the costly transfer of data to and from the cloud.
“Organizations are struggling to make the best decisions regarding the data volume and complexity created by the vast numbers of sensors, embedded systems and connected devices now on the network,” said Andy Rhodes, executive director, Commercial IoT Solutions, Dell. “As more of the data is processed in real time at the edge of the network, the gateway becomes the spam filter for IoT.”
Dell’s end-to-end portfolio
The Edge Gateway 5000 is the newest addition to Dell’s end-to-end portfolio of IoT-enabling solutions and services, which provide customers with choice and flexibility to architect IoT ecosystems with analytics at the edge, the cloud or the data center. The gateway is available for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to build into their solutions or for building and factory automation customers to use as part of their IoT strategy which can span data center solutions, advanced analytics and digital services. Additionally, customers’ can take advantage of Dell’s global availability, trusted security options, and Dell Support and Deployment services including ProSupport which provides end-to-end hardware support throughout the entire product lifecycle, helping customers maximize their gateway environment and minimize time spent on maintenance.
For example, ELM Energy is already using Dell gateways to make a difference in securing a more sustainable energy future. ELM’s FieldSight Controller automates decision structures that toggle between the use of distributed energy sources such as solar, wind and backup generators and traditional utility grid sources. The systems also help customers make decisions about the most effective times to broker surplus energy back to the open market.
“Through the power of technology, ELM Energy and Dell are enabling real-time decision making that is optimizing and balancing power generation and maximizing the use of renewable energy,” said James Richmond, president, ELM Energy. “For example, if the renewable energy being generated exceeds demand, our technology is able to automatically decide if the excess should be fed back to the grid or stored for later use when the renewable sources are unavailable. The new Dell Edge Gateway 5000 Series is the perfect platform for our FieldSight Edge software to perform computing functions close to the source, at a fantastic value.”
Additional Dell Edge Gateway 5000 Series benefits include:
• Ability to be mounted on the wall and to operate in locations with extreme temperatures like boiler rooms and deserts
• Expansive I/O structure designed to bridge both legacy serial connections (RS-422/485, CAN bus) and modern wireless networks (Wi-Fi, 802.15.4 mesh) to the internet with expansion capability for future options [they tell me that they are investigating a range of other connectivity]
• Operating system flexibility with choices that include Ubuntu Snappy, Wind River Linux, Windows 10 IoT Enterprise
• Security foundation including TPM, secure boot and BIOS level lockdown of I/O ports
• Manageability with Dell Command|Monitor for Linux and Dell Cloud Client Manager
• Dell is working with innovative independent software vendors and system integrators like SAP, OSIsoft, Eigen Innovations and Lucid to add domain expertise
• Standard Dell lead times allowing customers to receive hardware quickly, a rarity in the OT industry today
• Consulting, strategy and integration from Dell Services to help information-intensive enterprises like healthcare and insurance customize IoT approaches for their industry
Dell and Intel are also launching the “Connect What Matters” contest for innovative IoT solutions built on Dell Edge Gateways. The contest is open to commercial companies and solutions can be developed for any vertical. Participants will compete for the Best IoT Design, and the deadline for submissions is March 31, 2016.
