“What are you saying came?” A comment back from an
engineering house, as I started talking about the end users looking for speed
to production of projects and are prepared to compromise customization for
this!
Not surprising as their business is built around
satisfying end users desires for heavily customized automation and operational
solutions, even built on standard industrial products, companies have pushed
for the customization of these products to suit the way they intend or operate.
I would challenge
that these days of heavily customization are coming to an end, driven by the
need to get systems and plants up as fast as possible at the compromise for
totally custom solutions.
The concept of “good enough" driven from companies
such as Apple where their applications from the store provide “specific” task capability
(book taxi, airport flight status, email etc.) with limited customization and
configuration options, yet we constantly adopt them due to risk, and speed of
and convenience of now.
There are a number of trends that point to this move to adopt
proven completed functionality vs customize:
·
Also in manufacturing people are looking for
" plug in and play" process modules units, "skids" that
have machinery and control configured and proven and are already tested and
commission, so now we just have to plug them together. Example in packaging lines,
but even refinery ports where we have had modular solutions with equipment, instrumentation,
piping and control for years and just bolted and plugged them together.
·
Multi site companies are driving programs around
standards, and then enforcing these to be rolled out and managed across sites
and in many case different system integrators.
- So now as look at the
adoption of “Managed Services” into the industrial market, we see the need
for speed to full production as key, causing people to avoid capital
projects/ RFPs and look to gain an advantage by using what is available
already as a “managed service”. This has not hit larger companies but certainly
is becoming the norm at Tier 3 (small companies) and at tier 2 companies,
who want take advantage of the opportunity now. The concept of a set of
managed services for:
- Energy monitoring and
analysis across all my pumping stations in a water plant or plants
- Production/ process
information solution that draws up real time data from many plants and
assets and stores it in a historian like storage, with out of the box
notifications, rules, and analysis clients that are self service to a
wider community. Again this could be across facilities monitoring,
unconventional gas wells, pump stations along a pipeline etc.
- Manufacturing operations
(MES) for a particular industry that provides manual good/ materials
receivables, inventory and WIP management across the manufacturing floor,
production order management to CNC machines etc. Again the screens, the
forms, the reports are built for that industry, the proven system, the
companies provide the master data (customers, products etc), and the rest
is available fast as managed services. So a typical MES/ Operations
project for a small plant with RFP and definition would go from 6 month
to 2 weeks and extremely low risk.
At VM Ware conference two weeks ago again we see the cloud
services, and significant discussion that adoption of cloud based services is
at the expense of customization. The idea of plugging in a solution and plant
and leveraging the design as is will become the norm I believe in the next 3 to
5 years, and certainly provide the edge of agility to those adopt this approach.
Does
this mean I think the day of the system integrator is over, NO, they have the
unique domain knowledge to build these ‘managed services” and provide the local
services to rapidly deploy standards and “managed services”. Yes the way of
working in the engineering house will change but I see this as significant
opportunity not the other way round! 
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