There’s an important trend on delivering profitable growth without sacrificing quality, an emphasis on accessing data’s true potential and increasing adoption of technology to build resilience, enable agility and increase sustainability, according to the recently released 9th Annual State of Smart Manufacturing Report, a global survey of over 1,500 manufacturers.
The report also reveals that sustainability and ESG are integral to manufacturing. Over 98% of respondents noted some type of sustainability and/or ESG policy, with about 50% of those having companywide formal policies. And, significantly, 83% of all respondents anticipate using Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in their operations in 2024.
Improving efficiencies is one of the top reasons cited for this trend, suggesting sustainability is now recognized for its operational improvement capabilities, impact on the bottom line and positive social impact.
Prompted by inflationary pressures and rising energy costs, manufacturers are also ramping up technology investment to counter risks. Thirty percent of operating budgets as opposed to 23% the year before was spent on technology. The two most popular technology investments – Cloud / SaaS and GenAI are delivering the highest returns.
That’s where the Rockwell Automation Industrial DataOps solution, FactoryTalk® DataMosaix™ comes in. As a new, innovative and ingenious tool hosted in FactoryTalk® Hub™, it’s a cloud-based solution that connects OT, IT and ET data sources with standard and flexible data connectors to enable enterprise-wide, data intensive solutions.
It can handle large amounts of data coming from different sources such as pdfs, videos, images, CAD files, zip files and so on. All this data can be brought into FactoryTalk DataMosaix from on-premises or cloud sources by means of extractors. The raw data is transformed into assets, time series, events, files and other data objects. After extraction the data can be contextualized and FactoryTalk DataMosaix can help you organize the data in whatever way suits you best.
From Data Rich and Information Poor, Companies can Now Identify Meaningful Data
This exciting, new offering allows manufacturers to explore data and find insights that can help them make better decisions. Industrial knowledge graphs can be generated to convey the relationships between the data as well as powerful time series graphs. From here, manufacturers can build an application to consume the data by using built-in data connectors, SDKs or APIs.
Manufacturers can also use the embedded chart and query functions to view the data and models. Additionally, FactoryTalk DataMosaix provides essential connectors such as Power BI and Grafana. Users can create dashboards and use other visualization tools without having to write code or have any technical background.
FactoryTalk DataMosaix offers a competitive advantage because it enables people of different backgrounds and knowledge levels to work with meaningful data, create insights and analyze data with greater depth than ever before. Developers, managers and stakeholders now all have the ability to work hand in hand to create informed decisions based on data.
Benefits
- Accelerate digital transformation
- Improve workforce productivity
- Optimize production
- Reduce maintenance costs
- Outpace the competition
Capabilities
- Standard and flexible connectors to aggregate OT, IT and ET data
- Centralized access control, data governance and traceability
- AI-driven data contextualization
- Data exploration via search, asset hierarchies, interactive diagrams or 3D models
- Flexible data modeling
- Charting and no-code analytics
- Pre-built connectors to industry standard visualization and data science tools
Adding a New Energy Solution, FactoryTalk® Energy Manager™
Built on FactoryTalk DataMosaix, FactoryTalk Energy Manager is a new, IT/OT convergence platform-based energy monitoring and optimization application that provides energy and production information based on an energy plant model of the underlying process at a plant, process area, line and machine level. Manufacturers can understand where, when and how their facilities use energy to establish the necessary scope of their energy savings efforts and define key metrics.
What manufacturers want to know:
- How much energy is consumed to make this product?
- What are the energy intensive processes?
- How do we avoid costly energy demand charges?
- How do we achieve uptime and reduce energy costs?
- How do we increase throughput while reducing energy usage?
- How do we create a more energy efficient machine?
An additional area of opportunity lies in looking at other factors that can influence the cost of production for energy management, beyond knowing how much energy usage went into manufacturing. The depth of data available through correctly optimized industrial DataOps can look at any number of elements, for example:
- What’s the net out where electricity gets cheaper at night to use but that is offset by higher labor prices on the “third shift?”
- How can a manufacturer using hybrid ovens with both electric elements and natural gas options balance which one to use at a certain time?
- Looking at ambient conditions in a plant, is the quality higher if the air-conditioner is operated at a lower temperature during the summer or does that impact electricity costs to the point that it offsets that quality gain?
With the FactoryTalk DataMosaix solution’s flexible and scalable tools to accelerate data usability by domain experts and analysts, manufacturers can now make informed decisions based on their energy consumption with controlled access to relevant and contextualized data.
Accessing Data and Insights for Increased ROI
Customers can now benefit from significant energy savings with the data insights provided by FactoryTalk DataMosaix and FactoryTalk Energy Manager. The software also has the capability to free up resources and employees from spending time trying to identify meaningful data. Now, they can access the insights with ease and introduce the changes that are needed.
Visit our website to learn more about FactoryTalk DataMosaix and FactoryTalk Energy Manager.
