Cloud in the Industrial Landscape

I am struggling and understand why there is a debate on Cloud in the Industrial Architectures.The Cloud is here, it is real, and most of us use it many ways today. Many of us had a similar concept in past architectures with main frames, for central data storage. The Cloud technology provides a natural fit to many Industrial Operational Landscapes, in order to address multi site, the roaming user outside the plant, and sharing of information across the industrial enterprise.

For the past year, I have talked about the evolving the Industrial Enterprise, with multiple sites, and the need for standards, in KPIs, data structures, objects layouts etc. How to achieve this without a central repository? With the infra structure increasing both in networks both wired and wireless, 3G/ 4G that all devices can leverage this growing infrastructure. Even in remote places on distributed gas fields, people are designing the industrial architecture to leverage the 3 G mobile networks, providing  10 mb with a dual modem, so why not?

Certainly as we access the changing "jobs to be done" or increased scope knowledge workers are responsible for across sites, the increased data/information access, we see Cloud as a natural part of the architecture both public and private, or within a plant site, but still managed from outside service. Things are changing too quickly on the IT side for people to keep up, and the need for common.

So you will start to see historians be sold in the cloud, already Enterprise Asset Management systems are sold as a service hosted in the cloud running across multiple sites.

In small businesses (e.g.| Companies/ sites with small employee counts and often not It or engineering resources on site),  the concept of MES, information systems, historians, and even HMIs be hosted or sold as a service is logical. You maybe laughing at the HMI as it “must” be local, yes, but I went to 3 small business sites last week, and all would prefer not having any PCs / servers on their site. Already their ERP and back office (Microsoft Office) hosted outside, so why not HMI, Historians and MES? With “thin client technology, virtual machines”  there is no need to put a PC on the shop floor, it is easier to have a thin client that enables independence of the Operating System.

Standards such as report templates, KPIs, Knowledge based systems all need to be central, and the cloud technologies like MS Azure enable the infrastructure out of the box.

At Invensys we are assuming the Cloud as an option in solution architectures as people go forward, that does not mean it is required, but people can start with an " on premise" and evolve latter on the technology should allow this. The industrial applications should evolve with the architecture, allow companies to expand and evolve, even having different architectures for the large plants vs the small plants, but still achieving the unified industrial landscape.

Instead of saying, it will not apply in the industrial world, this technology provides the opportunity to solve some of the remote operational challengers end users are facing with standard technology, in a secure way. Instead of asking “WHY WOULD WE USE CLOUD in INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS?”. We would should be asking “WHY NOT USE THE STANDARD OFF THE SHELF CAPABILITY SUCH AS CLOUD?” 

Reaction to my Blog on Windows 8!

Two weeks ago I discussed the fact that I believe the release of Windows 8 is a key milestone in the evolution of the Operational Experience.

There was a lot of reaction and debate as some people took this “as there will be a quick adoption of Windows 8 in the industrial environment”, which is not what was stated. The comment was relative to key milestone. Many people have gone to Windows 7, and it is a remarkably solid release, and will satisfy people for years.

Some people commented that Windows 8 will only be for the commercial market, e.g.| the “surface" tablet market, this will initially be true, but people also said with the IPAD people would not take it up. At a conference 2 weeks when Iooked around 90 % of people were on tablet devicse vs 2 year before everyone was taking notes doing email on laptop computers. We are all still doing the same “job" of taking notes and doing emails, but we have shifted to a new device due to the technology making my execution of job of taking notes and emails more efficient due to:

·         Size of the device it is easier to carry and handle at the conference

·         The speed at which it boots up, it is instant vs starting up.

·         I can see emails fast

·         I use mind manager for note taking this runs well as an app on the tablet

·         I can also draw diagrams easily that are captures as part of my notes

·         I can also take photos of diagrams, slides and whiteboard discussions and include these all as part of my notes.

People did not recognize this 2 years ago, but they now see the advantage and have evolved.

Looking at Windows 8 it provides significant new capability and paradigm change by going to “touch” that when combined with new devices, pcs coming from the hardware suppliers there will advantages people see in improving their “jobs" on the industrial floor. These advantages will only become fulling clear as people apply it.

But when combined with:

·         Gen Y’s expectation of “touch” experience

·         The natural requirement of collaboration over multiple interfaces in one system with personal or role base views to information

·         The whole methodology of jobs today, requiring evolution of the operational experience.      

Windows 8 is a potential key milestone, but that does not mean fast take up, that will probably come in Windows 9, as the story, situation, and advantages are well understood.

An example of the advantage of the “touch” world is the zoom by gesture it is natural to zoom, or expand out, and then swipe left and right for panning, these are far more natural than the taking a mouse a “clicking” on a location and dragging a zoom box over the area I want see in more detail. Watching my children struggle with mouse vs the touch screens of the IPAD they ask why we need to do this, they first go to the screen which is not “touch” enabled, but that is natural.

I will ask the same question I proposed 2 weeks ago:

“As you go to upgrade the industrial interfaces, would you not buy devices include these capabilities and come with Windows 8 vs the traditional PC, even if your HMI, Operational experience has not evolved yet?  

Time for “Off the Shelf” Operations/ MES Solution

As I sit on another plane heading across the Pacific from California, I have time to reflect on the discussions both this week, and over the last 6 months, with leading food and beverage and process companies.

The growing trend in the MES space, (which the dominate solution is “custom solutions”), is to replace these systems with “off the shelf” products, enabling companies to focus on the core business. This trend is similar to the ERP space in the 90s, and initially in the MES space in the late 90s, and 2000s, but MES solutions of this time did not deliver the complete solution, and the eventual solutions have become unsustainable for the “operational journey”. Thousands of sites have installed MES Products from Invensys and other vendors, that are  highly successfully having run for over decade delivering significant value, but this time around there is more functionality capability people want, the architecture is not just one plant but multiple, and tolerance for custom code has significantly dropped. So why? And why now?

Rotating Staff, Worker Retention becomes key Design Considerations

After 2 weeks in Asia, and the 2 weeks before travelling Australia and USA, the concern of worker retention, and the different attitude of the Gen  Y, rotating work force is of real concern.  In China they already shifted to an educated GenY late Gen x population of workers keen to learn, jump to experience rapidly. With this comes ambition to change, and experience so many discussions talked centered on worker retention.

This discussion will continue to grow as people realize the reality that people will take on roles for shorter times, rotating locations, or advancing the ladder, moving from company to the company as opportunities arise. In software; we saw this in the “.com” era, where we saw a 20% turn over, but with that we saw  evolution in the work environment.  The idea as attract and retain people, with both interesting work, and an environment which has services and facilities to make people want to stay.

The same is starting to happen in the industrial sector with the “Integrated Operational Center”, bringing operators and experts into environments that and better for families, and working, as well as enhancing  collaboration, increasing agility. As we go through the next 5 to 10 years in the transition from “Baby boomer” and Gen X to Gen Y, the learning of a role, situation must be different. It must enable:

·         Self-Education

·         The ability to Ask and learn, this means knowledge systems at the finger tips no matter what device, location, or situation.

·          To learn on the job, “Youtubes” and knowledge embedded into operational experience

·         The ability to access experience through collaboration with experts no matter where they.

As stated in earlier blogs; this must become a part of the design of Operational, process, maintenance and operational management experiences. Not an afterthought, but just a natural configuration as people do today with alarms, they should configure knowledge access. If you are sitting designing operational experiences at the moment, sit back and allow yourself time to understand how you will add the learning experience so that the user will be able to become experienced and capable in an efficient time.

The two countries I am seeing this change most pronounced are China and South Africa, as they both have an educated Gen Y coming through more rapidly than in most countries to fill a void of Baby boomer and Gen X. The demand for a new generation of experience will grow, and Advanced Process Graphics will help, but experience must be embedded.