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!
