To be competitive, you must be connected. That is why industrial companies around the world are undergoing a digital transformation and moving toward smart manufacturing. By creating a unified network architecture – one based on the use of standard Ethernet and Internet Protocol (IP) technology – that leverages both the information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) that make up the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), companies can:
• Gain real-time visibility into operations
• Optimize production assets
• Predict downtime issues
• Improve collaboration and innovation
Building the Infrastructure
The true value of a smart manufacturing can only be realized if a secure and reliable information infrastructure is in place. However, with greater connectivity comes greater exposure to cyber risks. With the right focus and support, organizations can simultaneously manage risks, and address performance and security needs as they build and manage their information infrastructure.
A modern, secure, and reliable information infrastructure connects assets, people, and information.
It is central to everything and is the source of endless opportunities for improving your operational performance.
A Journey Toward Connection
There are four stages to deploying this level of connection:
1. Assess and Plan:
A comprehensive assessment will establish to what extent your infrastructure can be upgraded, or if it needs replacing.
2. Secure and Upgrade:
Securely upgrade your network and controls to facilitate communications between plant floor and enterprise systems in line with your company’s business drivers and risk tolerance.
3. Manage and Analyze:
Define and organize data and turn it into actionable information that can be more easily viewed and securely shared for continuous operational improvements.
4. Optimize and Collaborate:
Optimize your operations and drive collaboration across your teams, suppliers, and customers.
The process of creating a secure information infrastructure that can deliver on your needs is woven into these four stages. Each company’s transformation will have its own unique considerations.
Mapping Your Journey
Every path to smart manufacturing will be unique, based on production goals, connectivity and security needs, and the production infrastructure currently in place. But there are four key questions to ask as part of any plan:
1. What performance goals do I need to achieve?
2. How do I assess, design, and implement the secure infrastructure that I need to achieve my goals?
3. How will I protect and maintain my infrastructure?
4. How can my infrastructure help improve the performance of my devices and system in a way that will continue to deliver on my performance goals?
1. What Are My Performance Goals?
Your production goals will drive your information infrastructure strategy. These goals may require specific operational improvements, such as:
• Gaining real-time visibility into operations, including KPIs and asset performance
• Optimizing asset utilization and worker productivity
• Improving collaboration, whether it is between plants or with outside partners
• Reducing risks that are related to safety or the industrial skills gap
Your goals will drive your requirements. Some performance benefits producers can expect from an improved information infrastructure include multi-discipline application convergence and improved asset utilization
Whatever your goals are, they will rely on a robust and secure Converged Plantwide Ethernet (CPwE) network architecture and should be formalized into a plan with a defined scope, timeline, budget, and related security considerations.
2. How Do I Assess, Design and Implement the Right Infrastructure?
Once you have defined your goals, you must next determine your infrastructure needs in order to reach those goals and maximize ROI. This process has three key phases:
1. Assess
Infrastructure assessments help determine if your networks meet your needs and align with industry best practices. Risk and vulnerability assessments also help uncover security gaps and prioritize necessary updates so you can improve your security posture and reduce risk.
2. Design
Your information infrastructure should be designed to drive optimal network performance, mitigate security risks, increase data availability and use, and provide a foundation for future technologies.
Pre-engineered solutions can help drastically reduce design time and risk for some aspects of your infrastructure. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) can be supplied as a complete and installed system, reducing your capital expenditures.
3. Implement
Your implementation must meet the needs of both your IT technologies and OT environment. It should also aim to simplify and accelerate your infrastructure’s deployment.
• Training and certification can help make sure workers have the right expertise for implementing networked industrial control systems
• Vendors can provide documented processes and on-site guidance, or even a turnkey rollout of the updated system
3. How Will I Protect and Maintain My Infrastructure?
Enlisting a traditional IT company to support your information infrastructure can be risky, as IT vendors may not have enough expertise in industrial environments or plant-floor priorities to meet requirements for the quick response times that minimize downtime.
But enlisting the support and counsel of industrial vendors who understand the needs and demands of OT environments is a valuable means of supporting blended IT/OT applications.
Protection That’s Right for You
Support is available based on your specific needs.
• Cybersecurity Services: As the number of industrial security threats continues to rise, you need to take a closer look at risks to your environments. A proactive approach to industrial cybersecurity spans the entire attack continuum: from identifying critical assets and protecting against potential threats before they happen, to detecting them if and when they occur, and to ultimately having a plan for response and recovery should a threat be realized.
• Threat Detection and Response: Beyond monitoring, additional security services can detect and alert operators of irregularities and potential threats in real time. Depending on the criticality, the team can react to the threat based on a response plan to help mitigate the risk that is associated with the anomaly.
• Remote Support and Monitoring: A vendor can monitor your infrastructure 24/7. If they detect an issue, they can either notify you and suggest a response, or remotely act to remedy the problem directly. Guaranteed response times can be built into the service to ensure actions are taken within a predefined time frame.
4. How Can My Infrastructure Help Improve Asset and System Performance?
Your goals may also require the implementation of new capabilities that are related to system or asset-performance management.
With a secure and robust information infrastructure, you now have the connectivity that is required to tap into strategies that can boost your bottom line. Large amounts of data lives within your production assets, but it needs to be transformed into useful information to drive performance improvements. Evolving services can help you do just this:
• Asset reliability: Services exist today that combine a mix of industry expertise and electrical automation controls knowledge with continuous improvement processes, reliability techniques, and asset intelligence systems to help drive plant productivity, improve asset reliability over your equipment lifecycle, and streamline maintenance activities.
• Preventive Maintenance: Service agreements can keep your critical assets running at peak efficiency. From identifying pending system failures to recommending which components should be repaired or replaced, these services can help mitigate the unnecessary repairs and associated costs that occur with most time-based preventive maintenance programs.
• Remote Monitoring and Analytics: Monitoring services can reduce Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) by 76% and reduce the cost of managing your infrastructure. Analytics services can help you predict machine failures, reduce Mean To Between Failure (MTBF), and automate maintenance activities to reduce downtime by up to 30%.
Such services also have value beyond day-to-day process improvements and issue resolutions. You can use access to insights to optimize your larger operations and transform how you do business, reduce downtime recovery, or help integrate your supply chain.
