IS MDM the same in in the Industrial space as in Enterprise?

Following on from last week this is a good question that may take a couple of weeks to explain, debate.

Synching between systems, I see people look at data warehouses , they do manual binding, but these are just not practical in a sustainable and every changing world. There are many systems usually upwards of 20 + systems which come from different vendors and even if they do come from the same vendor they implemented by different cultures in the plants. The thought pattern on “just asset naming” is different between these groups. So the concept of MDM for Industry is a hidden one, but we believe is a key one for the future of sustainable solutions that are federating multiple systems together, so expect to see investments and products to trying to address this. In this blog I want to have a discussion on why MDM what it is, and Gerhard has done a good job, and I will expand on it.

Does Master Data Management does it Apply in Industry

 This again most automation engineers and plant personal look at me with a "blank look". But those in the business side / IT understand the need and challenge. But the real question does this have a chance to really work in the operations level 3 space, let's have discussion around this.

As Gerhard Greeff – Divisional Manager at Bytes Systems Integration put it in his paper"When last did you revisit your MOM?"

"Master Data Management (MDM)

The third proof of this conservative thinking is that very few manufacturing technologists have ever heard of Master Data Management (or MDM) and fewer understand what this actually mean. Enterprise solutions have long relied on MDM systems to ensure naming consistency and data translation between disparate enterprise-level solutions. Manufacturing has not even given this a thought as can be seen by the proliferation of point-to-point interfaces between systems."

Around the 2000 time, I like many of the MES linked people were looking at how to integrate to ERP systems through EAI etc, and we found ourselves on many inter- operative meetings. Discussing how bring S95 to reality, how can lower the risk, and engineering in this interoperability. Now 10 years on the EAI approach has worked for some companies, but as one of them said to me that 10% of the challenge and inter operative communication, synching is between the ERP and MES/ Operations. Actually 90% is at the ISA level 3 and it is as another company put" the invisible barrier, limitation to achieving industrial agility".

 

Remote Diagnostics Monitoring logical for Preemptive support, and Higher Availability.

I talked about last week the influence of IT on the strategies for System Administration/ Diagnostics with respect to drive towards using off the shelf IT tools for System Admin such as Microsoft’s System Center.  But there is another trait form It coming into software and that is the desire for pro-active monitoring of the software systems, vs the traditional just logging of systems.

I was in an executive meeting a couple of years ago in Southern Africa, where we had a number of the CIOs from some of the world leading companies and we discussed the shortage of expertise, the outsourcing of IT and engineering, and the increasing complexity of solutions, and most of all the ever changing evolution of modern software components of a solution. These brainstorming discussions around one table with a set of leading thought leaders , brought up challenges and opportunities.

One of the key challengers was having expertise on internal teams that understood the error measures , best practices and can stay up to date, as it is hard to (impossible to have dedicated people) to one system or product. Now this has been solved by traditional database companies, and systems, by these companies providing a diagnostics / monitoring service that pro-actively   the site systems, with a dedicated team of product experts, who are up date and can dedicate 100% of their time to staying up to date. In the "Business Applications Software" segement and in DCS hardware, and High availability hardware companies this has existed for a long time, but  not in the traditional automation software sector. But again in the last 2 years we have seen this practice, or service come being offered.   

Already Invensys Southern Africa  has set up and is offering this service as an Invensys Sentinel service:

“As skills scarcity increases, most production technicians are stretched to the limit with their Daily tasks. Little time is left to maintain the running software systems and very few can find the time to develop and maintain specialist knowledge to diagnose faults on these systems.

As a result of this change in market conditions, Invensys offers Sentinel Services (ISS) technology that monitors the performance of your Wonderware system — continuously.

Invensys delivers the following Sentinel Services capabilities:

·          Continuous proactive monitoring

·          Remedial remote diagnosis support

·          Wonderware system health review

Command Center in South Africa

We achieve this by installing special “agent software” on each Wonderware server located at customer sites. These agents monitor the system on a 24x7 basis to ensure that critical resources are performing within best practice norms.

If an unacceptable threshold is reached, an alarm is raised and Invensys engineers are alerted before an issue develops. Remote connectivity is also designed to ensure that, if there is a problem, Invensys experts can work with you to make appropriate adjustments to correct the issue and return your system to normal operation quickly and easily.

It is typical of the innovation of the Southern African team, and you can expect to see this evolve into a main stream offering over the next 12 months.

Again these CIOs (eg IT) had an expectation of the fact they can monitor their business datbases and applications and systems by external services with with the expertise WHY NOT in the automation/ operations software. Another example of impact of existing IT practices and it been adopted as an acceptable practice in this automation sector.

But I would question the need for just monitoring we want to go to exception based awareness of the software systems, and treat these as assets in your production system just like the your large capex assets such as furnaces, bottling lines, pump stations, WHY NOT? I would like to start down this topic this week and expand to making Software apart of Asset Maintenance strategies.

What is the influence of IT on System Administration/ Diagnostics Approaches in Automation/ Operations  Systems?

The continued transformation of the automation/ operation systems under the significant influence of IT continues 14 to 15 years after the influence started to be felt during the “year 2000” panic and awareness. To me the most significant impact of this period was that corporate IT become aware during the software audits of the amount of desktop/ and servers running on the plants. From this time I have sat in many meeting where leading company IT engineers have discussed how they can bring more management and therefore sustainability to these systems.

The pressures on these trends / discussion continue and for good reason:

·         Security and threat of cyber security attacks down in plants is now not a dream but a reality

·         The continue stream line of IT and driving the IT cost down through outsourcing.

·         Also the never ending annual, and sub annual upgrading of OS especially now that most automation/operations systems run on Microsoft Operating systems, there is a treadmill of upgrades, due to security and technology evolution.

These are to name a few, and this is so different to 80s and 90s (when many of the current automation systems where originally developed), where the OS was isolated from these outside effects.

But the above pressures will not go away, no matter how much automation engineers “dig their heads in the sand”, because the reality of:

Why SOA in industrial/ manufacturing space?

This is a question I have heard a lot, I have also heard SOA been thrown about in  Industrial market limited real understanding of the potential value.

So this week to add to the discussion I have included an extraction from “When last did you revisit your MOM?” By Gerhard Greeff – Divisional Manager at Bytes Systems Integration

“You may think that the SOA concept applied to manufacturing is outrageous and that it will never work. After-all, you have talked to the Enterprise Architects and they just don’t get the complexities of the manufacturing environment. But before you skip this section, do yourself a favour and read what SOA actually does according to Gartner and MESA and then think how you can apply that to manufacturing and MOM specifically.