Industrial Internet of Things, enables going beyond the 4 walls of a Plant, to Mobile Plant Supply Chain

The last two blogs on the “Cyber Physical and Operational Management Evolution” and “How do you Achieve Orchestration in Industrial Internet of Things without Managed Configurations and Standards?” have created a lot of activity in hits but also email discussions.

This is good to see as two years ago these subjects would have hardly moved the needle, and they real opportunities for leading companies to embrace to expand their capabilities beyond the four walls of their plant.

Again last week I was involved in a number of discussions around these topics and liked one of my South African collaborators discussing how we have all these rich applications and capabilities for the fixed process plants, WHY cannot we apply these same tools to “MOBILE PLANT”?  Now he was from mining and was launching into the extraction side of mining and how to optimize the asset utilization, but he really wanted to go beyond that “Operational Optimization”.

The targets are not about data, what I like he is putting real operational goals in place:

• Operational Processes optimization, understand operational times vs expected times and analysis of areas to improve
•  Asset utilization / optimization
•  Energy and Fuel optimization

As he put we have platforms in the plants that abstract equipment below, and model these equipment so we can record, track their operations, and then apply operational process improvements, and built in operational process rules for the fixed plant. Now taking this to mobile these same platforms could be used but now across mobile equipment, so now we must record geographical data as core as location is key when using fuel, doing operational routes, and time is of essence. But the Delay accounting applications of today could be applied to these mobile equipment and we could then move beyond that to embedding operational best practices and operational behavior in the devices, and equipment to guide the operations to work within the “operational windows” of optimized performance.  

The diagram below shows a more detailed chart of maturities I mentioned last week. The concept of smart, to optimized and autonomous can only come with inbuilt operational strategies and practices that enable the orchestration I talked about last week.

Source ARC (arcweb.com).

The key is most of the mining extraction/ mobile plant is isolated, and I would say siloed even when connected between applications.

Remember the Industrial Internet of things is not about data, it is about “actionable decisions” in the NOW, by either machines, applications or people, and this will require embedded operational strategies/ processes that coordinate the mobile equipment to align with the overall business strategies.

If you are looking in the plant / fixed process world to apply IOT and gain significant value, you should think again and “open the door” and look outside the plant to mobile plant, or mobile supply chain, and extend the richness of operational applications to these traditionally isolated equipment and processes!