May 2019

unified vision of “why?”. What would you like to achieve? Many staff members will think, well, I’m making my product just fine, hitting production targets. So why the extra cost to make things Smart? “IIOT is a means to an end, it’s a mechanism to achieve what you want to achieve.” Andrew Hodgson, strategic sales lead – Digital, for Siemens points out. This should be obvious. But I fear, with the hype around Smart Manufacturing, it may not be. You can have all the smart technologies you want, but if they do not solve a problem or improve a system, then it’s a waste of time and money. Sadly, in my role as sector head for Industrial Automation, I have come across stories of companies buying technology for the sake of it, without thought of the problem they are trying to solve. This often leads then to drop the tech and lose the confidence to implement any further technology updates – I even know someone who manage to get a robotic arm for next to nothing, from one such company. Hodgson asks; “What is your 1-, 3- and 5-year plan? What are your obstacles and how can technology solve them?”. In short, we are talking about Smart Manufacturing, but once you’ve put this publication down, or left a smart manufacturing seminar, you might have a strong desire to make something “smart”, but the fundamental consideration must be, what are you trying to achieve? Sometimes you don’t know what is possible until you’ve talked to your stakeholders – often the answer to what you have to do is sitting in the shop floor. Sometimes the problem you need to solve isn’t obvious. For example, Chris Evans noted that he had seen examples of the “soft benefits” of digitisation (i.e. the non- production benefits) being more remarkable than the technological benefits – for example the solution to a technical problem, high product failure rate, also dramatically reduced the number of sick days taken by the operators, because their stress was reduced. This all comes back to internal communication. And of course, it’s not enough to know what you want to do, you need to know where you are currently in order to understand what you can do. We could go out and design and build a factory from a smart manufacturing perspective tomorrow. But most UK manufacturing plants aren’t like that, they’ve been around for decades. Data collection was never part of the brief. Chris Evans explains that: “The first thing you’ve got to do is create an infrastructure which allows you to gather data in the first place. It’s all OK talking about pushing everything to the cloud and the rest of it, but actually if you haven’t got the means to gather the data, you have to start at the bottom.” Andy Graham, Wonderware product manager at Solutions PT agrees that you can quickly and easily get more out of a system by means of just low- cost sensors, however “before doing any of this, I think there is a step before. You need to do a maturity model. We’re talking about a “journey” here, you have to understand where people [already] are in that journey. We still come across a lot of people who aren’t even connected in any way”. The group all agreed that the industry still talks about “islands of automation” (i.e. automation systems that don’t communicate with each other), and the British custom of sweating the assents means there is a lot of legacy machinery and products that don’t talk to each other. With legacy equipment. baggage IT systems, MES systems, MOM (Machine Operation Management) systems that are just sitting there, Andrew Hodgson says some manufacturers don’t know which way to turn. And the problem is perhaps that there is often some grand idea that “infrastructure” means a complete factory refit, but it doesn’t need to be so. The consensus advice within the group for my automation novice manufacturer is just this. Start small. In fact, often a stand-alone IIOT system equipment (though this sounds like an oxymoron) on legacy is the best way to start down the IIOT journey. For Mark Butters, general manager for Omron this is not only a low risk way of getting started, but also a good way to get reluctant adopters on board. “[The key is] to go in and identify the quick, relatively easy wins that can be demonstrated across the business and then you get the snowball effect. People then buy in to the technology”. As Andy Graham’s said, a lot can be achieved with very little. And even complete analogue machinery can be made “smart” (an excellent example of this is the 1950’s Colchester Bantam lathe the AMRC digitalised for under £500). And there you go. My manufacturer, now having considered where she is, where she wants to go and who she needs in order to get there, can now ask “OK, where do I start?” In the next issue of Smart Machines & Factories, GAMBICA’s members discuss the practicalities behind implementing IIOT within your machine, process or plant. www.smartmachinesandfactories.com May 2019 | 27 | | STRATEGIES – GAMBICA three-part digitalisation series |