Industry 4.0 is all about automating industrial processes for efficiency and scale. Historically, automation has been accomplished by combining various means of mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical, electronic, and IT. But Industry 4.0 will take automation to another level, one where machines talk to each other to get things done. Not only will robots be coordinating tasks, they will integrate forecasting, production scheduling, and supply chain management for a dynamic and efficient production environment.   More efficient, sure, but dynamic?   Yes. The day will come when the device being manufactured will communicate with the production environment, giving instructions on configuration and options, resulting in each device being “custom mass produced”. This, of course, will be enabled by adding significantly more IT capacity. And I’m not talking about just leveraging centralized cloud computing. I’m talking about   edge computing.   How enterprise IT, edge IT, and the cloud work together in Industry 4.0.   You may have seen my previous blog,   The Secret Sauce for Industry 4.0 — the Micro Data Center at the Local Edge, which discusses why we need edge computing for Industry 4.0. And, you may be asking yourself:   Where does IT fit in the Industry 4.0 ecosystem? Are there special considerations to deploy IT on a factory floor — considering IT is usually deployed in climate-controlled, very clean data centers? How do I make my IT reliable in this seemingly harsh environment?   These are all excellent questions and why we wrote the white paper   Industry 4.0: Minimizing Downtime Risk with Resilient Edge Computing.   The new white paper starts by looking at the cost of downtime in different manufacturing environments, then it highlights key emerging technology innovations in Industry 4.0.         The paper also focuses on how IT and OT are converging to enable smart enterprise control and how to deploy edge IT to the lower levels of the automation hierarchy to drive efficiency and scale. The paper outlines how enterprise IT, edge IT, and the cloud work together in Industry 4.0. It also covers the challenges of deploying edge IT in manufacturing environments, and the best practices to achieve resilient edge computing, including physical infrastructure hardware and management software.   Industry 4.0 is a game changer that will further automate industrial processes.   Edge computing   is an integral part of the system, enabling reliable delivery of IT capabilities in extremely close proximity to the operation. I encourage you to read   Industry 4.0: Minimizing Downtime Risk with Resilient Edge Computing   as it will help you in your journey to reliably deploy edge computing into Industry 4.0.   The article is originally published on se blog and authored by Steven Carlini ... View more

By Kevin Brown and originally published on the Schneider Electric Blog   I recently moderated a LinkedIn Live Innovation Talk on Industry 4.0 and the rise of industrial  edge computing . The panelists and I discussed the best ways to be agile and efficient in a fast-paced, digital world as comments flooded in real-time from around the globe.  Like a distant echo from the ‘80s, I could hear Ferris Bueller say, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”   Life is moving faster than ever and so is our dependence on IT. If you want to capture all the benefits of technology — speed, security, scalability, reliability, and more — it’s pretty clear it will require more computing and IT at the edge, close to the end-point generating the data. That’s why industrial operators who want to reap the benefits of increased automation can’t rely on cloud technology alone to bring the resiliency and speed demanded by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other Industry 4.0 technologies. Edge computing solutions solve this need for localized computing power to help accelerate your business, and in industrial environments, this application is referred to as the “industrial edge”.   Only 10 percent of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud, and this figure will grow to 75 percent by 2025, according to Gartner. With that in mind, I met virtually with Sophie Borgne, SVP of Digital Plant Line of Business at Schneider Electric, Tim Black, Global SI/OEM Program Director for AVEVA, and John Vicente, Chief Technology Officer for Stratus Technologies. We wanted to have a conversation about what’s really happening in the industry.   Benefits Companies Can Expect from Industry 4.0 Innovation   At a time when uncertainty has become commonplace, Sophie Borgne discussed how operations and control professionals are facing many challenges related to CapEx, OpEx, and continuous improvement priorities.   “Industry 4.0 transformation is an opportunity to transform their industrial operation into smart operations,” she said. “Through digitization they can enable and benefit from agile production, optimized scheduling, and a truly digital supply chain.”         She specified higher speed, waste reduction, and energy efficiency among those benefits. To her, the bottom line is industrial end-users and machine builders are seeing a significant impact on variable and fixed production costs while running more robust and higher quality manufacturing.   Just like Ferris Bueller’s roundtrip from the suburbs to the big city in a borrowed red Ferrari wouldn’t be tolerated, neither will a roundtrip to a cloud data center and back when latency is the enemy.   Three Major Points for Digital Transformation Success   For success in digital transformation, John Vicente stressed three major points: customer maturity, partner ecosystem, and converged IT/OT.   When it comes to customer maturity, he acknowledged that you must know where your customer is on their journey.   “Every customer is going to be on a different path and understanding where their operations, their infrastructure, their workforce is, is pivotal to be able to address what steps they need to be able to move forward,” he said.   Once you know where they are on their journey, you can understand your customer’s requirements and deliver the solution with an ecosystem of partners.   “No one organization or supplier can deliver the complete solution to the customer, so it’s important there’s a collaboration across the different partners,” John said.   When it comes to delivering IT/OT converged solutions at the industrial edge to enable new applications, John stressed the need to modernize infrastructure and that siloed technologies are no longer viable. He highlighted collaboration and Schneider Electric’s partnership with AVEVA and Stratus to deliver best-in-class solutions and an industrial edge computing reference design framework. The pre-configured reference designs can save up to 40 percent in field engineering costs, move systems to market 20 percent faster, and reduce maintenance costs by 7 percent, he said.   “The customer gets a faster time to value and everybody wins,” he added.   Opportunities in Industrial Edge Deployments   Tim Black discussed how industrial system integrators have a unique perspective when it comes to understanding the data being collected, and the future for them will be understanding what is done with the data.   “Industrial system integrators, they typically have very strong domain knowledge,” Tim said.   Like John, Tim stressed that one vendor doesn’t supply it all, but with Schneider Electric, AVEVA, and Stratus providing key components of the solution, systems integrators will have a solid ecosystem of partners supporting them.   Tim shared a customer success story of La Tortilla Company in Santa Rosa, Cal, a company with a wide range of disparate systems that didn’t work together, but they had to be able to provide accurate performance data. Wonderware California, an AVEVA distributor, used one of its endorsed system integrators, APEX, to finalize a design utilizing AVEVA edge devices that were connected to the disparate automation and control equipment, proving “on-the-edge” real-time visualization, maintenance capabilities, and operational flexibility. AVEVA System Platform consolidated the information from an enterprise point of view, allowing for upload to the company’s business IT systems and reporting on their operational efficiencies.   “The end result was a 5-percent improvement on their throughput, and what that means is 1.5 million tortillas per day!” Tim said.   It’s Not Too Late to Watch the LinkedIn Live Expert Session   In addition to these insights, Sophie, John, and Tim provided much more during the session. For example, Sophie highlighted the importance of innovation and the shared ecosystem. She detailed new   industrial edge computing reference designs   Schneider Electric has built not only with AVEVA and Stratus, but also with HPE and Lenovo, and the new   Schneider Electric Exchange   business platform, with a dedicated community of experts focused on industrial edge computing.   If you are interested in Industry 4.0 and the industrial edge, I encourage you to   watch the session on-demand, and if you’re not familiar with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I encourage you to watch that too. Life moves pretty fast. I’d hate for you to miss either one. And, please download the new   Industry 4.0 white paper   for further detail and analysis of this topic.     ... View more

Technology is playing a big part in our everyday lives and advancements in automation will continue to evolve in many different forms. Think about when we used stamps and had to mail in our bills. Now, payment is scheduled and automated on-line through our bank. How about when we left the heat or air conditioning on all day when nobody was home? Now our thermostats know when we’ll be there. Our cars can park themselves and many forms of autonomous driving will be popping up, as some vehicles automatically update their self-driving capabilities (as local governments approve them) at night when we are sleeping.   Sometimes I have to remind myself that tech wasn’t always part of our lives. The first exposure that most people had to automation was most likely a simple robot used in manufacturing. Early robots were only capable of performing one or two sets of repetitive tasks in a highly controlled environment. Some notable early robots include:   First industrial robot designed by George Devo in 1954. First industrial robot used by a major manufacturer was General Motors in its New Jersey plant in 1962. First 6 axis robot was developed by German robotics company KUKA in 1973.   When I was an MBA student studying in Germany 20 years ago, I visited a Mercedes automobile plant that had zero “active humans” in the manufacturing environment. It used an untraditional production line with cars on individual smart platforms “floating” from station to station. It was most likely one of the first Industry 4.0 factory environments as the platforms communicated with each other and the stations that moved the cars. Humans were involved only in testing spot welds on a small sample percentage of frames using rubber hammers and changing the dies on large metal stamping tools for the car body. Neither of these functions were in the production flow.       Companies Embracing Industry 4.0 Have Great Expectations   Academics, politicians, and business leaders have hotly debated the definition of Industry 4.0 since 2016 when Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, published a book entitled The Fourth Industrial Revolution. A good Industry 4.0 definition by Meenu Singhal, VP, Industry Business, Schneider Electric, states that “machinery, storage systems and production resources carry out complex tasks, exchange information and give instructions to each other, without much human involvement.” However, the definition is “fluid” and open to updating as needed. The truth is there’s no one, agreed upon definition.   Companies embracing Industry 4.0 are expecting to increase automation, agility, security, and resilience. They may be planning to leverage some or all the following: Internet of Things (IoT), M2M communications, big data and analytics, advanced simulation, augmented reality, next generation connectivity (WiFi 6, 5G), and low latency cloud computing.   While the goals and ambitions are clear, the path to achieving them is not.   Many organizations start by looking for a path that improves current operations through the technology Industry 4.0 affords. These improvements could also be classified as beginning the digital transformation of manufacturing operations, which may cause organizations to confront unfamiliar, more nuanced risks. To mitigate this risk, it makes sense that these technologies will be phased-in through the life of the manufacturing line as incremental improvements.   The initial step for most companies is to massively scale their metering, sensing, and video capabilities – generating big data. Integrating, interpreting, and analyzing this data for their benefit is key and it requires IT in the form of compute and storage. This is an opportune time for most companies to consider a local edge micro data center in the control room of the manufacturing site; this solution is the secret sauce of Industry 4.0 for manufacturing.   Advancements at the Edge with the Micro Data Center   Micro data center solutions will be small and deployed close enough to reduce latency while providing high levels of compute power to process the incredible amount of data generated by IoT sensors and high definition video cameras.   Some may ask, “Wouldn’t it be easier to process this new, big data in the cloud?” The issues with sending or processing information to the centralized cloud are threefold: Timing – real-time and autonomous manufacturing and quality control needs to be done in real time and there would be a minimum of 10-100ms latency processing in the centralized cloud. Bandwidth – new orders of data magnitude within the manufacturing site will generate massive volumes of content that would overwhelm external networks. Cost – significant amounts of content stored and processed in the centralized cloud (even if you could get it there) would be cost prohibitive. In addition, cybersecurity is a benefit that could be realized by using local edge micro data centers instead of the cloud. If the data is all being sent to one local edge data center, that data center can be used as the single fortress protecting attacks from reaching beyond that site. As data is processed at the edge, rather than being sent to the cloud or a centralized data center, the risk is much lower that it will be tampered with or intercepted. (Want more insights? Check out these other benefits of local edge infrastructure when managing the digital transformation).   Analytics is Just the Start of the Industry 4.0 Journey   Enabling machines to talk to each other and share information opens the door to more advanced analytics and visualizations and simulations based on real-time data. Decisions and actions from the digital world will translate into movements in the physical world. For example, manufacturing machines could analyze production efficiencies based on the availability of the raw materials, the performance and availability of robots, and the energy costs, and decide what to build and when to build it. A next step could be enabling the products being produced (whether it’s a toaster or a television or anything else) to actively communicate with the manufacturing robots to add options or increase manufacturing efficiency.   High bandwidth video use will increase. It will be utilized in security systems, as it is today, but also in applications like quality control. It will help automate the analytics on production equipment by adding sensors and video cameras to identify wear and potential for failures. High bandwidth video used in real-time manufacturing will require local IT processing because a single high def camera generates about 300GB of data per hour that needs to be processed in real time (multiple cameras are more likely). The best solution for this would be another micro data center dedicated to the IVA (Integrated Video Analytics) function, located on or immersed into the manufacturing line.   Starting an Industry 4.0 journey requires planning and implementing IoT devices and systems in conjunction with edge computing to enable an efficient platform with advanced analytics, augmented reality, and, eventually, autonomous robotic production. That will be when the production machines will communicate with the products being produced. This journey will most likely be phased in as technologies are added. With increasing sensors and cameras comes increasing need for local IT housed in micro data centers. High bandwidth function like video analytics and big data applications will need dedicated local edge micro data centers incorporated into the production line. Explore more about the micro data center, a solution that will enable this digital transformation.   Originally published on SE blog by Steven Carlini ... View more