Thanks to major advances in technology, standards and approaches, the wish list of today’s industry professionals is vastly different to five years ago.
We have come a long way from jealously-guarded proprietary solutions to the open systems and technologies of today. Since technology is no longer an excuse, we are left with the challenge of getting companies to think and operate as single, unified entities whatever their size or geographical distribution – and that is a little trickier than you might think. Yet, if we take it back to basics, what are the primary challenges that executives say they face today?
* Establishing the value of the enterprise’s activities and initiatives.
* Better information from accounting.
* Higher resolution costing and profit information.
* Having employees aligned with the business strategy.
* Protection of existing investments.
* Flexibility of choice regarding solutions.
* Agility to cope with the unexpected.
Notably, there is no mention of ERP, MES, scada or any other acronym. That is because the critical factors that make companies successful cross all artificially-imposed boundaries. Information segmentation is not helpful except to categorise information domains.
Addressing the above issues is tightly aligned to the company’s strategy for achieving its business objective and what is needed is an approach that truly optimises the merging of human and technology resources to this end.
So, the trend is for manufacturing and mining companies to move away from a blinkered look at individual applications to a broader view of their corporate needs. At one end of the spectrum there is ERP business systems and at the other process control and industrial automation applications. Less than a decade ago, the thought of reconciling these two extremes and pointing them in the same direction seemed just so much fantasy. But MES came along to help close the gap (and add another dimension of complexity) while standards helped to ensure the connectivity and longevity of disparate solutions from different vendors.
It is important to highlight the fact that for the past two decades, there has never been a shortage of solutions to address virtually every information aspect of the mining and manufacturing industries. Yet, there was always something missing. New implementations were taking longer and longer because of the increasing complexities of the industries and applications. While capable of sharing information with others they still lived in their own isolated worlds. If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail and industrial automation applications were written with the concept that the company did nothing else and ERP systems were implemented with the belief that they were capable of spontaneous wealth creation without recourse to anything else. With this scenario, satisfying the first four challenges facing executives was not feasible and enterprise unification through information integration was still a long way off.
The missing link turned out not to be yet more applications, but a unifying platform that could provide the infrastructure for applications to plug into and share common functions such as alarming, database access, standards development and deployment, web communications, etc.
Imagine that each of your desktop computer applications had its own operating system, device drivers, HMI and were supplied by different vendors. The end result would be a nightmare to operate, maintain and enhance. Well, that is not far from what was happening with industrial information applications before the advent of a unifying ‘operating system’ designed for this environment.
Thereafter, when a new piece of the puzzle was released to address wanted functionality, it could plug into the existing infrastructure (‘operating system’) and look after past investments by capitalising on their contributions. Such an approach meant that engineering costs were slashed by more than 50% through the ability to develop, deploy and maintain standards while ‘common-to-all’ tasks (database, alarming) were handled automatically.
Today, this ‘operating system’ handles all industrial automation applications, MES functionality and enterprise integration software including Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence. In fact, it will continue to handle the unexpected because that is what it was designed to do. And that is where the industry is heading.
For more information contact Jaco Markwat, Wonderware Southern Africa, 0861 WONDER, jaco.markwat@wonderware.co.za, www.wonderware.co.za
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