Open Systems Present Industrial Production Businesses with Strategic Management Decisions

Summary

There are many open architecture initiatives, discussions and products for industrial manufacturing and process companies to consider and determine if they are positive business investments that will improve or hurt competitiveness and profits. Understanding the trade-offs and using accurate criteria to measure and judge investments to create an integrated real-time industrial manufacturing business is an important strategic management activity.

Users of Distributed Control Systems (DCS) are particularly interested since those systems have significantly lagged in the adoption of open standards compared to the open standard advances and implementations in the PLC (Programmable Logic Control) industry. Closed architecture DCS systems have significantly higher costs—including host software, DCS controllers and I/O costs—compared to PLC systems that fulfill the same specifications.

Open systems for business and personal use have delivered great advantages. The general non-DCS industrial automation control industry certainly improved price/performance with the adoption of many commercial technologies, such as Microsoft Windows HMI and Linux server implementations of SCADA, data historians, commercial clouds and open Ethernet industrial networks. Open systems are also enabling more intelligence to be driven into edge devices including sensors, analytic instruments, valves, drives and mechatronic transport.

 

Make versus buy

In the early days of PCs, some businesses thought they saved a significant amount of money buying motherboards, cards and pieces of software to create their systems. Those businesses learned that the integration was not trivial and, depending on the vendor selected, keeping systems running could become a challenge over the lifecycle.

Control and automation systems used for discrete or process industries are significantly complicated and must meet performance and system availability requirements for manufacturers to be profitable. Manufacturers of products continually are faced with fundamental make-versus-buy decisions for their business to be successful. The core part of this decision process for product manufacturers is, what are the things we need to invest in to be excellent at to be competitive and profitable? 

As technology development and system integration become easier with plug-and-play and no-code programming of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies, the criteria change for making these decisions. Analysis that simply looks at raw costs without considering other factors, including lifecycle costs, is incomplete and misleading. When deciding to purchase any control and automation solution, the first question may be does the solution meet my project application performance requirements? But additional fundamental questions must also be asked about costs and system maintainability:

System maintainability

• What are the maintenance people’s knowledge requirements?
• What spare parts inventory is available and how much does it cost?
• What is the extent of lifecycle spare parts support?

Development costs

• Application Engineering and Configuration Labor Hours
• Software Programming and Configuration Labor Hours
• HMI Application Engineering and Configuration Labor Hours
• Software Programming and Configuration Labor Hours
• System Commissioning Labor Hours

Implementation costs

• Purchased Hardware and Software Costs
• Control and Automation System Integrator Costs
• Software Integration Costs

A strategic business issue for industrial automation

The technology gap between industrial automation and the rapid influx of new technologies has created an awareness among manufacturing management and personnel that this gap is a strategic business issue. The management people I speak with in discussions and business forums are concerned that competitors throughout the world are not burdened with old ways of doing things and will more easily leverage technology in their operations to gain a significant competitive advantage. Management decisions are critical for future success and profits.

Digital Manufacturing Architecture (DMA) requirements are driving integration with mainstream information technology (IT), industrial cybersecurity, cloud and IoT protection technologies and methods to create more responsive and efficient manufacturing environments. Major technological advances include the incorporation of firmware/hardware in controller intelligent sensors, actuators and other field edge devices, MQTT, OPC UA and OPC UA Field eXchange (UAFX).

Productivity and profit opportunities

There are opportunities to dramatically improve industrial manufacturing and process business performance with the influx of new technology from established suppliers and new suppliers. The digitalization of manufacturing is the next logical step in modernization following the re-platforming of enterprise systems with high-performance technologies including real-time ERP, analytics, AI and cloud applications. The integration of manufacturing automation into the enterprise is essential to accomplish the digitalization transformation and to be competitive.

The most effective architecture requires orchestrating and optimizing all elements of the process for flexibility in the face of external changes, including supply chains, customer demands, costs, availability, energy and sustainability requirements. The emerging Digital Manufacturing Architecture leverages advances in distributed computing and open systems to accomplish this and achieve synchronized, real-time, optimized production.

Customer orders, supply chain factors and factory operations are fed into the digital twin, an ideal operating model of the plant and its processes. Real-time linkages throughout the system create a closed loop with constant feedback, whereby analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning adjust and optimize operations.