January 2021

Wearing facemasks has become a well-established practice in manufacturing plants 27 www.drivesncontrols.com January 2021 MANUFACTURING n The benefits of following this path are clear, facilitated by the evolving asset care regimes of preventative and predictive – through to prescriptive – maintenance. Operational efficiencies can be improved, production throughput can be increased and downtime reduced. Now, more than ever, manufacturers need to embrace the digitalisation process, which is challenging when many organisations have been operating in survival mode through the crisis with a subsequent lack of money for investment. Therefore, the scale of any short-term investment in the manufacturing process may be reduced, which makes it even more important to discuss and plan an achievable result, balancing what is available to invest against the best return on that investment. A well thought-through implementation plan will show that following a staged approach provides an entry level that can be achieved with the minimum of investment and yet deliver tangible results. It has been shown that automated manufacturing plants that rely less on manual labour are more resilient to this type of crisis than labour-intensive ones. Automated plants also allow the manual labour to be deployed elsewhere in the organisation on less mundane tasks and provide opportunities to upskill the workforce. Future proofing Moving forward, all businesses, whether SMEs or larger organisations, will benefit from adopting or implementing further automation and smart manufacturing. This journey can start with small steps and evolve over time against an agreed plan, but it is extremely likely that manufacturers that run smart operations and make themselves more resilient will prosper as we work our way out of this pandemic. At Mitsubishi Electric UK, we have found that early engagement with manufacturers is vital to understand their goals, business requirements and potential obstacles, and then to develop a staged plan to map out the road to what smart manufacturing could look like for them. It is also important to consider all of the elements necessary to deliver a complete system, including cybersecurity. It would be easy just to relate everything to surviving the pandemic, but it should also be viewed as a catalyst to implement change. Manufacturers that follow the journey towards digitalisation and smart manufacturing, scaled to suit their enterprise, will create more agile and flexible manufacturing environments which will be ready to react to changing customer demands and will allow them to stay ahead of their competitors. n Navigating the new norm Hajime Sugiyama,“industrial IoT evangelist” in Mitsubishi Electric’s Factory Automation group, examines ways of adapting factories to the new normal. Social distancing, protecting your employees, restarting operations and machines, catching up on supply chain gaps. Like society as a whole, manufacturers are experiencing many additional challenges they did not expect, often with reduced budgets. So how do you navigate the new manufacturing norm? For a start, how do you implement social distancing in a factory? It’s an interesting question which has more permutations than most people initially consider. Starting with the individual, you can use face guards and masks, and indeed many industries have traditionally used such PPE (personal protective equipment), but this was driven from a hygiene or clean environment point of view for industries producing such things as food, drugs, electronic equipment and semiconductors. Such PPE is not desirable in all industries, however. For example, in hot or humid environments wearing a mask may increase the risks of heat exhaustion, so you need to really understand the worker’s environment. Some plants are using screens between workers, but this is also not a panacea as it can introduce issues of limited space and restricted movement, as well as possible problems around access to emergency devices (e-stops) or to reporting/controlling devices – or simply visibility challenges. Many manufacturers are focusing on social distancing through shift management. To achieve this, you need to balance work shifts so that fewer people are working together at the same time. But this presents a whole new set of challenges. Balancing shift patterns can offer a level of operational redundancy – for example, if one shift needs to be suspended due to infection, the second and/or third shifts can continue after the plant has been cleaned thoroughly – but if fewer people are working, it will naturally lower productivity. So how do you counter that? Building extensive automation solutions takes a great deal of time, budget and planning, and in these times when manufacturers want to get up and running quickly and flexibly, all three resources are likely to be in short supply. So what’s the alternative? One possible answer is the increased use of cobots (collaborative robots). Typically, these devices can be deployed quickly, are human friendly and so flexible that they can be trained quickly to do a variety of tasks, without needing extensive robotics expertise. They are usually very cost-effective. Enhancing cobots further with AI- driven environmental management software reduces programming burdens even further and can allow them to navigate dynamically around obstacles such as humans and other robots. It’s clear that one solution will not fit all, so flexibility is needed to adopt the right social, mechanical and collaborative systems. An additional consideration is remote access. Returning to full operations, restarting processes and lines often reveals underlying problems that were not previously visible and can create a maintenance nightmare. Remote access can be extremely useful, but if the device you are accessing is not intelligent, the value is drastically reduced because the amount of information available is restricted. However, if you are using intelligent automation devices which have degrees of self-determination and extensive diagnostics, resolving maintenance issues can be accelerated. While the essential performance and functions of automation products may appear similar, it is a mistake to think that all products are equal. For instance, it is not really true to say that all drives are the same. As an example, many inverter users will be familiar with simple features such as three-wire fans, the significance of which only becomes apparent at times like these. The ability to diagnose the health of the cooling fan can, in turn, help to extend the life of the inverter. IIoT and Industry 4.0 have been talked about for years, but at their core are the processes of communications, extracting data and analytics. However, when plant managers consider remote access they often quake in their shoes as they contemplate large Scada systems and their associated paraphernalia. Such systems are excellent for capturing vast amounts of data, providing alarms and analytics and reviewing historical data, but they do take time to plan and install correctly. Other, quicker approaches allow remote connections to shopfloor HMIs to mimic local screens, or accessing data via wireless interfaces or edge controllers. Sometimes, the answer is simply a partition screen; at other times, it is an investment in a cobot, but the watchwords are flexibility, scalability and focus on results. So perhaps the new norm is actually reminding us to identify what is important.