Automation Today Issue 72 | Cover Story

Increase Operational Resilience with Smart Safety

Learn how adding smart capabilities to safety enables manufacturers to gain new efficiencies, improve product quality and make operations safer.

Discover the benefits of smart safety solutions that extend beyond just protecting onsite workers and increasing productivity

In this new normal spurred by the pandemic, manufacturers and processors are easing into a new reality by running their operations remotely with employees working from home.

Digital transformation accelerated the ability for physical and organizational boundaries to be broken to engage a real-time workforce, connect teams, and drive collaboration. Companies are also under pressure to manage their supply chains to maintain their integrity and flexibility to respond to market demand shifts, also doing this from remote locations with the tools to monitor production with real-time visibility and control.

There are new methodologies and technologies required for this new normal, driven by the need to monitor and help protect against failures, deliver product fulfillment and high productivity, protect personnel, and do all this while leveraging enhanced safety and security architectures.

The digital transformation acceleration is driving the demand for smart safety solutions, which are now an essential component of a manufacturer’s and processor’s operational resilience strategy, and a key enabler of achieving the productivity required to thrive today.

The Convergence of Smart and Safety Increases Productivity

There is no question that the digital transformation journey requires end users and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to obtain much more production and machine information, which means that more industrial components need to have the ability to collect production operations or machine data, process that data into meaningful information, and send that information to the edge, to a control system, to a cloud, or some combination of those options.

This has led to the development of smart solutions that have these built-in capabilities to help production lines and machines to be more productive and information-enabled to increase production efficiencies and decrease unscheduled downtime.

In addition to helping to protect workers from injuries or potential life-threatening situations, such as cutting power while clearing a jammed machine or entering a work cell, the time saved by not having to, for example, continuously use the E-stop buttons to resolve machine jamming situations greatly minimizes the frequency and duration of unscheduled downtimes, significantly increasing productivity, and providing a quick return on investment.

Integrating safety to leverage the full capabilities and benefits of smart devices, such as gathering and processing data in real time at or close to the point that the data is gathered, but still able to leverage all safety functionality, represents a convergence of the two technologies.

Just as many companies are seeing their operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) functionalities converge, these devices used in processing and manufacturing applications are seeing their safety and smart devices converging for the benefit of persons who install, program, operate, and service the automation equipment as well as the manufacturing assets. So, this not only makes these assets safer to operate, but also provides valuable insight as to what is occurring, since the smart devices are designed to gather key data that can be analyzed and leveraged to make the overall production process safer, more efficient, productive, and profitable.

Operational Resilience Requires Smart Safety Solutions

One of the objectives of a company’s digital transformation journey driven by the new normal is to ensure resilient operations to improve its capabilities to overcome business risks, such as increasing cybersecurity threats, new regulatory compliance mandates, and more strenuous plant and personnel safety requirements, all of which drives demand for smart safety solutions.

Even before the pandemic, manufacturers and processors faced numerous challenges, such as market and commodity uncertainty, rapid fluctuations in demand; and the need to become more agile, efficient, and sustainable, all while maintaining a safe and productive working environment. However, the pandemic magnified those challenges, leading manufacturers and processors to strongly focus on operational resilience as a key corporate objective during the digital transformation process.

To achieve operational resilience, companies must often break down physical and organizational boundaries to fully engage its workforce, connect teams, and enhance real-time collaboration in an environment where safety is designed into the process.

Operational resilience also requires supply chains to be managed in real time to maintain their integrity, agility, and flexibility, enabling the supply chains to respond to market demand and shifts in material availability.

Companies are deploying new methodologies to protect against unscheduled downtime and asset failures, ensure product fulfillment, protect personnel, and enhance security architectures, all of which require a broad portfolio of smart safety solutions.

automated-car-assembly-line-plant-automotive-industry-shop-production-assembly-machines-new-car-warehouse

Smart Safety Solutions Help to Overcome Operational Challenges

Smart safety solutions are also critical to help companies solve a variety of operational challenges. For example, smart safety solutions are designed to require employees to follow standard operating procedures, account for any procedural anomalies, and prevent anyone from bypassing these systems and putting themselves and others in possible danger. This is especially critical with a workforce that is both evolving and becoming more remote, with older workers leaving or nearing retirement, and younger workers more susceptible to injury due to inexperience. Worker injury is often caused by trying to repair machinery or process downtimes caused by, for example, jams, misfeeds, and product changeovers.

Smart safety solutions increase the visibility of downtime information, providing context of the cause of downtime to the workers, such as a machinery fault, and then offering remedies to resolve these issues. Another area where smart safety solutions can provide help with operational challenges is with data management, ensuring that data collection and reports are based on the latest data and information.

Also, smart safety solutions minimize the practice of manually entering safety data for inspections, compliance logs, and incident reports since these solutions are connected to the plant floor systems, which helps to eliminate errors.

Regulatory compliance is also strengthened with smart safety solutions, helping to overcome the challenges of working with industry standards regarding documentation and reporting. Smart safety solutions can also be easier to install and maintain.

Usually, safety solutions require more complex wiring to obtain additional diagnostic data. However, an integrated smart safety solution can access critical diagnostic data with traditional wiring, thus saving time and costs, and helping to create a complete picture of the health and status of a machine or production line.

To address the market demand for smart safety solutions that increase both productivity and operational resilience in this new normal market that was driven by the pandemic, Rockwell Automation has been adding smart capabilities to its broad portfolio of safety solutions.

These solutions are designed to simultaneously improve safety compliance and production performance by analyzing and diagnosing data, and then converting it into meaningful information that can be used to increase productivity and decrease unscheduled downtime while maintaining safety integrity and compliance, all as our Connected Enterprise® strategy.

Smart Safety Designed for Both Onsite and Remote Workforces

The traditional value of safety solutions was to protect onsite workforces and increase productivity. But workforces today are a combination of onsite and remote and seek smart safety solutions that leverage the technology required for digital transformation.

This has led Rockwell Automation to design a number of remote monitoring and control capabilities into its smart safety solution portfolio. For example, to perform remote troubleshooting, smart safety device performance can be communicated over its EtherNet/IP network, which allows both standard and safety data to be captured on individual device operation and then visualized by workers from any location. Setup and monitoring of smart safety devices and access to device profiles can be performed from any location utilizing the Studio 5000®.

The EtherNet/IP network also enables predictive maintenance routines established from historical data to be sent from the historian to the smart safety devices, with the data collected from device operation, then being time stamped and sent back to the historian. It is also possible for remote workers to request safe access to smart safety devices over an EtherNet/IP network, such as indication of guard door position and guard lock status. Historical data access request can also be used for application adjustments. This is possible because of the safety over EtherNet/IP simplified network architecture, designed for standard and safety control managed over standard unmodified Ethernet.

Our smart safety devices provide data access into a specific asset or machine through individually identified access points, which allows data to be captured on individual device operations. Having smart and safety on one device helps to simplify wiring and system complexity. In addition, smart safety devices can also be used with existing safety devices on assets and machines to leverage the existing installed base and help prevent the need for rip-and-replace. Smart safety devices also allow predictive maintenance procedures to be adopted based on device usage or age.

CIP Safety Enhances Operational Resilience and Productivity

One of Rockwell Automation’s smart safety device differentiators is the use of CIP Safety over its EtherNet/IP network. CIP Safety is an extension to the Common Industrial Protocol (CIP), the application-layer protocol for EtherNet/IP. This capability also provides workers, regardless of their onsite or remote location, with greater access to the critical data needed to create a more comprehensive picture of machine or production line status.

The combination of smart safety devices connected to a CIP Safety over EtherNet/IP network helps to create machines or production assets that can provide meaningful information, so workers from any location can better monitor machine health, decrease unscheduled downtime, improve flexibility, and enhance safety, while helping to lower total cost of ownership and increasing the company’s operational resilience.

These devices connected to CIP Safety over EtherNet/IP network provide diagnostic information that can deliver more valuable insights, such as where safety-related failures are occurring or if workers are following standard operating procedures.

Processors and manufacturers can put these insights to work to help improve the productivity and sustainability of their production equipment. These capabilities can help to improve productivity, such as by notifying workers with an alarm if they are nearing a hazard to help prevent a machine from slowing down or stopping. In addition, the CIP Safety capability expands available diagnostic data to alert workers of common failures, such as the presence of dust on the scanner’s lens.

Smart Safety Fully Integrated into The New Normal

Adding smart capabilities to safety enables manufacturers and processors to gain new efficiencies, improve product quality and make operations more responsive and safer for what is often a smaller number of onsite workers.

Smart safety solutions help to standardize process, machinery, and safety control, making systems less susceptible to unscheduled downtime and helping to improve productivity and profitability.

Subscribe to Rockwell Automation and receive the latest news, thought leadership and information directly to your inbox.