July 2019

| STRATEGIES | the bottom line. At a time when political uncertainty is driving up the cost of doing business, many organisations are looking inward, searching for those all-important marginal gains. The convergence of IT and OT not only benefits from the resource sharing of connected devices, but it also promises to boost productivity. Better scheduling, production planning, material allocation, product tracking and real-time access to process data are quick and easy with the two realms working in sync. However, without an effective digital platform running at the heart of the system, businesses will continue to face issues with complexity, compatibility and cost. Advantage two: People The second major benefit of combining IT and OT is to allow staff on both sides to overcome their differences. Cyber security, decision-making, scalability and downtime are just some areas that can put IT and OT staff at odds with each other. Take downtime, for example. In mission critical applications such as food and beverage production, where unexpected downtime could result in spoiled produce, OT staff may be responsible for getting the line back up and running as quickly as possible. IT staff, on the other hand, may be responsible for ensuring data integrity for traceability purposes and will therefore prioritise this task. Advantage three: Place Business theory dictates that if you want to make it difficult for your competitors to enter your market, you need to put up barriers to entry. This includes technological, regulatory or economical hurdles that you’ve spent years overcoming, and ones that make it unattractive for new entrants to replicate. But what if these same hurdles prevent you growing as a business? This is often the case in “places” such as sugar refining, dairy processing, and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Businesses in these industry sectors have spent decades developing finely tuned proprietary processes that are not only difficult to automate, they’re difficult to scale. Take sugar refining for example. Because the harvesting window for sugar cane is so narrow — typically three months from December to March — manufacturers are under pressure to ensure that they can quickly setup the plant for seasonal production. What’s more, the process of turning raw sugar cane into the processed sugar we’re familiar with is a complex one. This involves many steps including shredding, milling, juice extraction, clarification, evaporation, syrup production, crystallisation, centrifugation, drying and packaging. All these processes need to be carefully co-ordinated as any downtime can be critical to the success of the final product. If the refining process doesn’t align perfectly with the harvesting window manufacturers may suffer from perished crops and lost revenue. Take advantage now As the industry breaks down the rigid barriers of traditional engineering structures, we’re seeing how powerful digital platforms can be in underpinning the sustainable convergence of IT and OT. The advantages are clear, it’s time for businesses to act. Maybe in another forty years, engineers will look back and wonder why industry was so reluctant to topple the figurative IT and OT castles. www.smartmachinesandfactories.com July 2019 | 19 |