The smart manufacturing factory employs 21st century technology to fabricate and assemble a mix of configurable products in response to immediate customer demands. It implements advanced processes that can incorporate technology innovation as fast as scientists and engineers develop it. It marries information, technology and human ingenuity to bring about a rapid revolution in product design, development, manufacturing, distribution, sales and service. It delivers these process improvements while also improving worker safety, minimizing environmental
impact, and improving product quality.
The smart manufacturing factory is at the intersection of a few technology initiatives including the development of smart manufacturing devices that are part of “The Internet of Things” (IoT), 3D model based manufacturing, and a re-architecting of enterprise systems around services and integration standards to improve communication speed and accuracy not only within the organization, but also with the entire partner and supplier network.
Smart Manufacturing Automation Devices
Manufacturing machines are getting smarter and are equipped with their own computers that control and coordinate a myriad of microprocessor chips on every sensor, motor, and actuator. Robots have been working behind fences automating many of the dirty, dangerous and dull work in the factory, and work requiring high levels of precision and consistent repetition. A new generation of easily configured and set up robots are being developed to assist human personnel side by side. For example, a prototype robot named Baxter (by Rethink Robotics, http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/) is taught his task through a demonstration by the operator on how to move its arm and hands to accomplish the task.
In the past, each advanced manufacturing center was managed as a process island within the plant operated by a few experts with its own special procedures and controls. The new generation of smart manufacturing equipment connects to the wireless network as easily as our cell phones and
computerized glasses (wearable technology in general), and will be ready to receive input and broadcast feedback. This creates an opportunity to standardize on new equipment and application data exchanges—machine-2-machine (M2M) and machine-2-application (M2A) —that eliminate the information silos within the plant.
For example, our espresso machines can already broadcast when they need coffee beans and when they need to be cleaned via a display at the machine. What if the machine also broadcasted that information to our home computer? An application on our computer could be tracking the inventory level of coffee in the pantry, the weekly usage pattern from our coffee machine, and could use this information to forecast when we would run out of coffee and even automatically put coffee on our shopping list. These are some of the promised concepts at home from the “Internet of Things” (IoT) (http://www.iot-a.eu/).
IoT concepts extend to the factory floor and the next generation of smart machines. There are efforts for a Common Industrial Protocol (CIP) to facilitate these type of data exchanges in the factory between machines, computers and personal devices.
The German government refers to this next generation of connected manufacturing machines, robots and information systems as “Industry 4.0” (http://www.bmbf.de/en/19955.php) and looks at it as the fourth industrial revolution. But to make Industry 4.0 a reality, equipment manufacturers will need to embed intelligence and communication capabilities into their products and we will need broadly accepted standards for communicating, collecting data and interacting with the equipment.
In the United States, NIST’s Smart Manufacturing Operations Planning and Control Program (http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/syseng/smopc.cfm) aims to enhance U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by facilitating the adoption of smart manufacturing systems (fully-integrated, collaborative manufacturing systems that respond in real time to meet changing demands and conditions in the factory, in the supply network, and in customer needs). This program will enable smart manufacturing based on efficient networked sensing and control, prognostics and health management (including diagnostics and maintenance), integrated wireless platforms, industrial control security, efficient information exchange and interoperability of system components.
Real-time Integrated Processes and Information Systems
IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analyzed as close to real time as possible. If a system can’t keep up with the volume of data, it will increasingly fall behind and its analysis and processing of old data will quickly be obsolete and of no value.
The recent trends in enterprise information technology (IT) have been to centralize applications to reduce costs. However, organizations will need to rethink that IT strategy or risk creating a bottleneck in an IoT world. The processing of data streams from smart devices will need to be
distributed and layers of systems will aggregate and filter the data from lower level systems close to machines, to layers of systems managing business processes (internally and into the supply chain) and all the way up to enterprise systems with centralized financial information for the business.
This might sound similar to having a SCADA or historian system collect machine information and pass filtered and aggregate data up to a Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) or ERP system, but it is different because the smart machines can do much more processing and
filtering of the data themselves and will be communicating with the same protocols that our cell phones and TVs use. For these smarter devices, we can probably skip the traditional layers 0-2 in the old ISA95 and ISA88 models. The machines might broadcast straight to a cloud service which in turn can broadcast to our personal device which has been registered via the company’s portal to receive specific types of messages.
From the product design side, especially in Aerospace and Defense industry, the “Model-Based Enterprise” (MBE) (http://model-based-enterprise.org/) is redefining how manufacturers work with engineering and suppliers in the digital 3D world. Product definitions in 3D formats need to be communicated through the supply chain and through our own internal systems for procurement, production and quality control. Change management practices in the 3D world set the bar higher than what could ever be achieved via 2D drawings and paper forms. The goal is full associativity between engineering, inspection, manufacturing, and service definitions to facilitate change and configuration management practices among multiple tiers in the supply chain.
NIST has a digital thread for Smart Manufacturing that picks up the work from MBE and takes it downstream and links it to the Smart Manufacturing infrastructure (http://www.manufacturing.gov/docs/DMDI_overview.pdf)
Over 50% of the actual manufacturing of a product happens in the supply chain and over 50% of the data exchanged with partners and suppliers still travels today over email, phone and fax rather than flowing directly between business applications via B2B (business-2-business) integration in
structured XML. This low adoption level of B2B integration is surprising given that the first EDI systems were introduced four decades ago and XML standards have been around for decades also. There has been a lack of a concerted effort to tackle this integration arena. Perhaps because
organizations have been plenty busy trying to orchestrate A2A (application-2-application) integrations within their four walls. However, with such a big percent of the success of the company riding on the reliability of these communications, it is time to start improving B2B
integration techniques with our supplier network.
MESA (http://www.mesa.org) and the Open Applications Group (OAGi, http://www.oagi.org/) have recently signed a collaboration agreement. OAGi is a standards organization managing XML integration standards for A2A and B2B communications and is widely used in the discrete manufacturing arena.
APICS has recently joined with the Supply Chain Council (https://www.gartner.com/doc/2728128/supply-chain-councilapics-merger- help) and they have the SCOR framework for supply chain management.
The SCOR model addresses business practices but do not translate to B2B integration requirements. OAGi is working on mapping SCOR to B2B integration standards. NIST is also working with OAGi on integration standards that span into the supply chain.
Manufacturing organizations that want to lead the next generation of supply chain communications should join these organizations and participate in these efforts.
Benefits of a new real-time integrated enterprise platform for smart manufacturing include:
• Accelerate time to market for innovative products
• Future-proof the IT investment with flexibility to easily switch best-in-class functional modules
• Reduce total cost of ownership with simplified management across the platform by leveraging plug and play integration
• Ensure tight integration between enterprise applications and operational systems at the shop floor
• Increase speed and accuracy throughout the extended value chain
• Gain insight you can act on with metrics acquired directly from transacting the business process model
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