There's an old saying that "Information is Power." But in today's manufacturing-driven organizations, data that is inconsistently gathered, categorized, and stored, can lead to little, if any, actionable information. That is, actionable information relies not only on data -- but data that is in the right context and in the right format.
Unfortunately, data-handling and information-sharing inefficiencies abound. Engineers program differently, the same labels are used to describe different data, control systems lack information-sharing compatibility, legacy systems often lack the capacity or intelligence to provide useful data, data needs to be transformed multiple times to work with different systems, there may be gaps in automation . . . the list goes on.
As the consumer world starts turning to BlackBerries™, PDAs, cell phones, and other means of providing integration of personal information, industrial automation suppliers are a step ahead of the game in providing standard-compliant technology and services as part of an integrated control architecture to integrate plant floor and business information. (For example, as seen here, collecting business cards is a routine practice. The cards may be used to update a number of tools, such as your cell phone, PDA, Rolodex, address book, and various contact databases in your office and home computers. The challenge is making sure the information is entered in all the appropriate tools, and updated whenever the person moves or changes jobs. In manufacturing, similar information-sharing inefficiencies abound.)
Integrated control architectures allow engineers to create information once and share it among machines, production lines, and facilities throughout the enterprise. This information is available to provide plantwide control and is accessible by operations, engineering, maintenance, and management in formats that are meaningful to them. By utilizing open standards and embedding business system technology into control architectures, vendors, OEMs, and end users can efficiently share information and gather data that allows companies to make faster, more well-informed business decisions.
The Key Question Is: How?
Valuable information is already abundant at manufacturing facilities. From customer specifications and raw materials to machine data and plant conditions, information is "born" in many different forms. The first step in information integration is identifying and collecting this information. The data must then be moved through the system, ultimately to the business level, formatted to provide actionable information to all those that need it to make decisions. Without an integrated control architecture, thousands of lines of custom software inside truckloads of computers and gateways are required to move data from machine to machine, area to area, plant to plant, and into the rest of the enterprise.
Consider this (not-so-uncommon) scenario: a manufacturer uses a control system from one vendor on the receiving side for material handling, uses another vendor's control system for batching, another for processing, and yet another for packaging and material handling on the shipping side. Special safety controllers might also be used in processing and machine control applications throughout the plant. In order to pull information from all of these disparate systems, the data must be touched at every step. This could even mean plant floor personnel walking around with clipboards to gather data from individual machines and typing the data into a business system database. A report then runs overnight and management looks at the report the next morning. The first chance to make adjustments or changes could be two days after inefficiencies or quality problems begin. This manual method of gathering and disseminating information is time-consuming and prone to errors.
Another common scenario is to move the data from controller to HMI to temporary database to corporate database, renaming, reformatting, and transforming the data at each step in the process to accommodate different control and business system vendors' formats. While the data moves faster than the manual method mentioned above, this technique is expensive and very time consuming to set up, integrate, and maintain. Its complexity and cost makes fast changes based on changing needs for information impractical.
Yet another example is a manufacturer using traditional DCS systems. These mostly proprietary systems are not designed for the management of information. In fact, they use a "store and forward" methodology, which means that machine information from another area is received through some kind of interface and pushed into a buffer where it is decoded. If information is born in the DCS, this information must be encoded as well. In order for information to flow, the data must be revised on each machine in the system. Again -- a time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive method of information sharing.
The Integrated Information-Sharing Solution
A true integrated control architecture cuts out the step-by-step manual data transfer on the plant floor. For example, the Rockwell Automation® Integrated Architecture is a plantwide control and information-enabling architecture that provides scalable solutions for the full range of automation disciplines including sequential, motion, process control, drive control, safety, and information.
Unlike conventional architectures, the Rockwell Automation Integrated Architecture reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) by using a single control infrastructure for the entire range of plant automation applications, large or small. This enables manufacturers to efficiently share valuable information between equipment and people throughout the enterprise. Further, it provides the flexibility to quickly change the information you receive based on your business's changing situation.
With this architecture, business system technology is embedded directly into Rockwell Automation Logix controllers, so all data is "born" in a format that is ready for direct transfer into business systems. And because Logix controllers use tag-based programming, all data starts with a meaningful name and format that can move seamlessly throughout the architecture. There is no need for temporary or intermediate storage in Human Machine Interface (HMI) or additional databases.
To showcase the differences in how data is born, consider this: Some programming environments force programmers to take data into a controller in an unformatted array that is stored in traditional physical addresses such as "%MW62.", requiring the programmer to "decode" the data and write a significant amount of additional code to separate and format the data into something meaningful. More sophisticated systems provide meaningful information automatically. For example, when a control device such as a motor controller is connected to Rockwell Automation's Integrated Architecture, 200+ well-defined pieces of information show up in Rockwell's Logix Controller, ready for use with names such as "Motor16.Start" or "Line4.Speed." This information can then be easily accessed and recognized directly by Rockwell Automation's RSView HMI products as well as transported to corporate databases.
From a Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions (MES) perspective, this is a major improvement as the information sought by the MES package over the network can be identified by name -- eliminating the need to create and maintain name/address lookup tables.
Another benefit of having memory match the real world is program documentation. Too often documentation is created after the fact, making it more time-consuming to create, and potentially error-ridden. Now, the user's program becomes self-documenting. The program matches the thought process and documentation is part of the program development.
Another benefit of the Rockwell Automation Integrated Architecture is that it makes it easy for both end users and OEMs to implement open standards like ISA S95 that help provide a common way of handling data and information.
Achieving a Competitive Advantage
With plant floor information being efficiently shared among machines, lines, facilities, and up to the business level, what's next?
Pick your business challenge: First, identify what business problem you are trying to solve. With the ease of gathering information inherent in an integrated architecture, knowing what to do with that data is the key to success. While storage of virtually all data may be necessary in some highly regulated industries, for many companies, mass storage mechanisms are a waste of time and technology. Data are simply values and numbers that need to be refined and formatted to become useful, actionable information upon which you can base decisions. The first step in making information productive is gathering and storing only the necessary data.
To accomplish this, choose your key performance indicators. For example, if a plant manager's goal is to improve the quality of the process, the first step is to understand the key performance indicators that provide information about quality. This differs for every plant, but could include information like alarm reports, Statistical Process Control (SPC) charts, change control reports, etc. These reports and charts can then be automatically formatted for secure use by appropriate personnel throughout the plant or enterprise.
Once the key performance indicators are gathered from the integrated control architecture and stored or reported in a useful format, personnel are then empowered to make well-informed decisions. The decisions might be to make small machine changes to improve the process, or it could be based on a full-line product changeover. For example, in the consumer packaging industry, market research often shows changes in preferences for things like shampoo bottles, juice boxes, and medicine. In these examples, the plant or production manager must understand the available information and how to make changes quickly to accommodate the new size or shape. The ability to make quick changes can provide significant competitive advantages for the consumer packaging line.
Understanding the information and being able to quickly digest its meaning is vital. In many plants, decisions require the manager to review numerous sources of information from disparate systems, in different formats, and make an educated guess as to what's happening in the broader sense.
Unifying the available information, formatting it for the appropriate user, and turning data into actionable information means operators and mangers are able to make faster, better-informed decisions, and take appropriate action. The final step in successfully utilizing plant floor information is ensuring that control and business systems are agile enough to take immediate actions. If the plant manager has the necessary data and knows what changes need to be made, but it takes too much time to make the appropriate changes, competitive advantage is lost. Here again, an integrated control architecture allows users to quickly make changes from one location and automatically update machines throughout the plant -- minimizing errors and increasing efficiency.
Using an integrated control architecture to integrate plant floor controls and top floor business systems enables manufacturers to make good business decisions and quick plant floor changes in response to changing market demands. The bottom line: taking full advantage of plant floor information enables companies to more easily achieve a competitive advantage.
