Is the end of heavily customised Industrial Operational Systems here?

“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!  

Role of IT changing from Central IT to Consultant IT as new devices/ and services become absorbed into the industrial architecture?

I thought this paper (below) introduced a fascinating discussion on the changing role of IT, from central IT to more of a guideline, consultant to management of devices and services in an organization. In the industrial space,  we have seen leading companies go from enforcing mobile device (the one issued by the company) to issuing one, but also allowing employees to bring in their private preference of the device and connect it to the corporate network and use it in the day a to day work job.

 This research is necessary, because it reflects and profiles a new order in directing and controlling the use of information technology, which we need to expand » 

Business Leaders Spending On Technology Because It's Too Important To Let I.T. Go It Alone

www.forbes.com

By John McCarthy In the Forrester report, "Tracking the Renegade Technology Buyer", we uncover the motivations and technology spending priorities of over 1,000 John McCarthy North American and European business executives. The data from the Forrsights Business Decision Maker Survey was collected in Q4, 2012. Of the 891 respondents that had a budget [...]

This trend will only continue as the Gen Y and Gen X will not put up with different experiences, therefore different operational processes. Another trend is the rapid mind switch from having to build specific applications for me or my plant/ role, to accepting “good enough” applications that can be down loaded and up and running in minutes, with limited configuration. Providing a significant increase in information available and for that last 20 to 30% that comes with custom systems people are questioning the time, cost and sustainability. This mind shift has come with home, commercial experience of the applications on the “Application stores” just search and select one and accept the value it brings the expectation is not that I can customize it significantly.

Example the applications below provide in a 10 minute setup and download (as long as the site has the remote connector that publishes the data to the cloud in a secure manner) 80% of the information many roaming workers need. Is it ideal layout reports in standard corporate format no, but it is “good enough” and is self serviced by the user delivering significantly more information than they have today.

On the back end systems,  the same is happening as the acceptance of SAAS and managed services within the Industrial Operational architecture grows, the need to have IT infrastructure reduces ut the capability grows in computing and capability by leveraging the service provider. IT will have to manage these service providers and plug them into the industrial architecture in a secure way that is aligned with the IT guidelines of cooperation.

One discussion this week was with large process company, and they said why would they use “cloud” in their operations they have covered in their industrial automation/ operations systems. This contradicted the operations team in the same company who are concerned about operational continuity and uptime, and with the increasing upgrades, security patches, they looking for the maintaining vital decision support capability at higher availability, a key advantage of a managed service is the increased availability. Combine this with the need to increase the information on an issue to a worker so decisions can be made faster. The discussion shifted to the requirement for understanding the “future” through “what ifs” and how that can be made available to all workers. This is near real-time activity, and could e a service hosted in the cloud (public or private) consumed by the users as needed, not all the time, but the computing power will need to elastic. It was not long before the IT member of the discussion was seeing the opportunity, and asking more questions, this will be increasing situation/ discussion over the next 12 months in the industrial sector.  

The growing influence of operations, and how to empower operational decisions in an increasing climate of workforce transition, and rotation, the acceptance by IT of using my device, and allowing these applications. Shifting IT’s role from not providing as this is coming from out side either with the device or from the service provider, but to consultant that provides guidelines and maintains the integrity of the security system.

Interesting thought and trend!  

Operational Advantage will accelerate “Managed Services” Cloud adoption in the Industrial Sector!!!!

For the last couple of weeks, I seem to have ended up in a whirlpool of activity and interest around the cloud in the industrial landscape, not just from within Invensys, but also in the customer community. A world away from a year ago when it was hard to strike up a conversation of any reality around cloud in the industrial landscape. So I called a few people in the field and people who had approached us, or our partners and in a discovery mode as to what is driving them and why now?