Manufacturing 2.0 what is it?

If you have been watching AMR now Gartner for the past 3 years they introduced the concepts of “Manufacturing 2.0", which looked at where manufacturing and industrial architectures could go. Many of the concepts were not new, but they did a good job showing a whole picture and the components needed to make this architecture real. Too often you get a concept thrown forward but it is only part of what is required, and people miss the whole picture.

But this concept of Manufacturing 2.0 has been picked up by MESA in their push on educating the market, and they now run certification courses on the concept of Manufacturing 2.0. These courses are good for hybrid, discrete and process companies and system integrators, even if you have been doing MES for years you will learn techniques and concepts.

The diagram below shows two levels of Manufacturing 2.0, one from the enterprise level, where the manufacturing is fitting into a corporate SOA architecture. Down in the bottom right hand corner is “manufacturing”, now the second diagram drills into the next level, showing a real SOA architecture in industrial landscape.

I was having dinner Gerhard Greeff last week who trains the MESA courses on Manufacturing 2.0. I have known Gerhard a couple years he has written some good papers on the topic, (especially one titled “When was the last time you saw your MOM?”) and it is always rewarding debating concepts, and validating many of the areas we working on.

Some key points we discussed what they call the Manufacturing Service Bus, and our proposal and work around what we developing called the ArchestrA Service Bus, which is a true web service bus, for the industrial landscape. This is currently going into beta and will be released in it' s initial form with data services in the System Platform 2012R2 releases due at the end of the year. The data services will be just an inherent component/ function of the ArchestrA infrastructure extending it to enterprise and multi-site. A first step to what we refer to as ArchestrA 2.0 our new evolution of the core technology and architecture of system that will go to enterprise.

You can think of ArchestrA 1.0 as unifying the plant, and ArchestrA 2.0 as unifying the industrial enterprise, which is where many companies are coming to. Allow multiple plants to become “loosely coupled but aligned", with standards driven over the sites, yet the uniqueness, individualism of the sites is sustained. Too many companies say they are SOA, but it is key to using true services, that have defined contracts, that will be sustained through changes of technology and versions. As we move towards Federation of more than automation systems but other applications and multiple sites that implemented differently the ability align, and relate data models through standard contracts will be key.

The challenge I have with “Manufacturing 2.0” being rolled out is that there is not an “off the shelf “ sustainable solution to achieve the goal. Because the other main goal required beyond aligned federation is to have solutions that are sustainable “limit custom code”. Can you build services YES, but it is key to build them into your architecture and culture to make them sustainable, that is why we working on many evolutions to achieve Federation in a sustainable manner. Let’s discuss this over the next couple of weeks.