The Connected Enterprise Production System: Changing the Way we Think about Industrial Automation

As we rapidly enter the Industry 4.0 era, the center of gravity is changing in modern manufacturing. A combination of innovation and access to technology, along with turbulent and uncertain global conditions, is pushing industrial decision-makers to reconsider their business models and go-to-market approaches. Adding to this a secular shift in customer expectations, businesses are seeking to innovate manufacturing solutions that are specifically scoped against end-user needs to drive definable value for their organization.

To thrive in this changing landscape, manufacturers need a higher grade of flexibility and the ability to react to change at speed. Conventional, more siloed manufacturing approaches are unable to deliver the interconnected, insights-based approach necessary. Instead, it requires a holistic system engineering approach to make data-driven decisions across production. This approach encompasses a range of areas including R&D, integration with business systems, product development and plant floor operations.

To make the transition successfully, it’s time for manufacturers to change the way they think about industrial automation.

Adopting a New Digital Identity

Digitalization doesn’t refer only to the systems used in production, but to the identity an organization adopts. Just as software has become characteristic of many digital-centric industries, it’s now becoming an innate part of the manufacturing sector. As such, manufacturing businesses need to embrace this identity and start thinking like software companies.

This has implications on many levels, including:

• How the business collects, cleans, analyzes, and acts on production data, drawing on a clear understanding of which data sources contribute to defining a competitive edge.
• How the business enables its workers to become connected, using digital capabilities to help operate more efficiently, whether on the plant floor or in an edge/remote location.
• How the business enables closer and more fruitful collaboration, both between internal divisions and with a network of partners, using open standards to resolve conventional frictions and facilitate fast integrations.
• How the business enables a culture of open-source software development to find rapid solutions to emerging business problems and reduce the burden placed on its developers.

By making digital solutions more naturally ingrained in production operations, the business can approach its objectives from a new, more flexible and agile position. This, in turn, puts the business in a place where it can gain greater control of the entire customer experience, from factory to consumer – in essence, becoming digitally native disruptors or innovators in their product category.

Adopting New Processes

This identity manifests at a production level across two axes of a digital manufacturing platform:

1. Manufacturing Lifecycle Management (Design, Operate & Maintain)

Manufacturing Lifecycle Management refers to the process adopted for plant equipment from commission through to end-of-life. In modern design thinking, we break this lifecycle into two levels.

Firstly, the Design level of a digital platform involves creating digital twin baselines and enhancing simulation and emulation experiences for production systems. These production systems combine software-based analytics and apps, using APIs, data analytics, machine learning, digital twins, with mechanical, electrical, process and control design.

Secondly, the Operate & Maintain levels bridge from IT and OT to the enterprise software category, which includes a greater level of insight-led approaches to operations management, control, production data, and intelligent devices.

The important point is that this lifecycle is managed in a holistic way, using core automation to coordinate and integrate the plant’s requirements, capabilities, and technologies to deliver the functionality required for the project.

2. Industrial Internet of Things

The second axis refers to the development of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to enable interconnections between the sensors, instruments and devices networked together with industrial applications. Adopting a digital production platform enables a more seamless flow of data from systems to worker, bringing a range of new capabilities to production operations.

This includes the power to:

• Expand, enrich, and expose industrial data, covering data management and machine/worker instructions.
  
• Digitalize information within the machine to bring massive value to the end user.
• Break down application silos across services, processes, tools for OT data, and applications.
• Enable Edge data management and Edge analytics.

Together, this creates the Connected Enterprise production system (CEPS) – a holistic, digital-centric approach to manufacturing. By combining the multi-faceted skills of specialists including data scientists, mechanical engineers and software developers, businesses can enable simple, more focused collaboration.

Bringing the Connected Enterprise to Life

CEPS provides the logical layers of the systems that interconnect at every stage of the manufacturing lifecycle. There are several results organizations can expect from adopting such a modern production system design.

Firstly, they can benefit from the scalability of SaaS / cloud-native production operations. This allows the company to migrate data and workloads to cloud locations where they can more easily be made available across their network of plants and remote locations, facilitating collaboration and powering business growth.

Secondly, they can realize new sources of value by exploring opportunities in industrial analytics, low-code applications, and connected-worker experiences. This helps to improve the measurability of production and instigate a culture of continual improvement. It also democratizes the process of software development, helping different plants and teams to customize applications to their own needs.

Finally, it helps the business build out a design simulation portfolio, utilizing the tools and techniques of digital twin development to enable rapid shift from idea to production. This encourages a culture of experimentation and enterprise, boosting the organization’s innovative potential.

CEPS changes the way businesses think about industrial automation. It opens the door to new ways of working, allowing greater visibility across processes. This enables the business to capture the value of data and analytics for better, faster decision-making that offers seamless connectivity to spur collaboration.

While there is a wide and varied range skills and expertise involved in designing and customizing a platform that cuts across established business divisions, Rockwell Automation and its PartnerNetwork^TM is perfectly set up to deliver the Connected Enterprise for customers as an integrated, holistic platform, to help our customers achieve what they need.

You can find out more about the Connected Enterprise and how it can help your business here.