Digital transformation. Smart manufacturing. Industrial Internet of Things (IoT). A connected enterprise. Industry 4.0.
Whatever you call it, data drives it. Digitalization is a fundamental element of a food and beverage producer’s success. Getting it right from the start can be the difference between unlocking millions in operational savings, or losing the same in inefficiencies and wasted time.
In the late 1990s, the term “big data” came on to the scene. Since then, we’ve gathered more data, trained scientists to slice and dice and make sense of it all, and tried to automate the arduous task of extracting business value.
While big data makes sense for some analytic and consumer applications, it is not a good fit for industrial applications on the plant floor. Instead, producers need contextualized, structured data to gain actionable information on KPIs like energy consumption, OEE, batch efficiencies and quality.
Smart objects have emerged as a new, simplified way to organize data so it can be easily collected from the controller, then moved to and consumed by IoT systems. The standardized framework fully exposes data sets to pre-configured context for the developer, greatly shortening programming time.
Said differently, IoT and automation systems have different rules, and smart objects create the common language for them to speak. At its core, smart objects bring automatic discovery, standardization, synchronization and integrity to your data.
Smart Data Animation: See how disparate data in a tag-based architecture is simplified and given context with an object-based ecosystem.
So why does this all matter? Ask any developer who’s worked in the IoT world. Nuanced, inconsistent data creates traps that result in frustration, troubleshooting and lost productivity. According to Forbes.com, data scientists report spending 80% of their time preparing data rather than mining for insights.
Consider a simple beverage line with five machines (see “beverage plant” animation). It may have over 1 million associated data values. Most companies don’t have the available resources to manage all this information, nor is it where they should be spending their time. Smart objects streamline data preparation, i.e. one model feeds many applications. One customer estimated it would have taken a developer one month to do what smart objects enabled in only 6 hours – a 96% improvement.
In addition, this more direct method results in better data integrity and determinism. We can compare what the same product does at different stages with unheard of accuracy and integrity. And, with the ability to assign attributes to the data such as OEE, energy or mass flow, we get information that is automatically aggregated and categorized. From there, it’s reported on in a way that is meaningful for both human and machine decision making and optimization.
In the end, smart objects don’t change the data. But it greatly simplifies how you capture, view and present it, and over time, how you optimize operations as a result of it. Let us know how smart objects could fit into your information strategy.
Beverage Plant Animation: See how Smart Objects makes organized, time stamped data easier to access and interpret by ThingWorx or other IIoT platforms.
Published June 22, 2020
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