The State of Industrial Manufacturing
Industrial manufacturing companies are at a crossroads today due to rising competitive pressures and customer demand. To effectively meet the global supply chain demand- the global chip shortage, for example- the need to produce more, faster, while ensuring quality, is critical. Tailwinds such as the proposed multi-trillion dollar industrial rejuvenation package by the US government would only fuel these trends further. To gain market share in such challenging times, industrial players must leverage the power of transformative technologies for greater resilience, adaptability, and proactive innovation as they scale business models, embarking upon a journey of Connected and Intelligent Enterprises.
Unlocking Industrial Value Starts with an IIoT Foundation
Industrial transformation begins by unlocking value with the IIoT- connecting assets, lines, areas, plants, and sites to a secure network- to reduce unplanned downtime, improve asset utilization, improve yield, reduce scrap, and accelerate energy efficiency. Industrial data from control systems, assets, MES, and historians is the oil that powers the convergence of the OT and IT worlds via a common information model at the edge. The power of OT data context is especially important here. Without deep understanding of the underlying manufacturing processes and circumstances associated with the OT data, it’s nearly impossible to derive meaningful insights that can be integrated back into the manufacturing process for improved performance.
IIoT Analytics Helps Manufacturers Address Top Use Cases
Industrial manufacturing organizations are hungry for real solutions that can help them transform their plant operations with IIoT analytics that leverages this edge OT data context and ready-to-go AI/ML solutions for OT professionals at the shop floor. Rockwell Automation’s strategic IIoT analytics approach and full-stack capabilities accelerate time-to-value for industrial organizations by simplifying the practice of data science for OT personnel, extending insights to drive action in real time, and enabling flexibility at enterprise scale. Here, we elucidate this with a few industrial analytics dashboards for Asset Performance Monitoring, Predictive maintenance, and Intelligent process control use cases.
Heavy and process industries often have hundreds of assets across multiple sites and need the flexibility of configuring custom calculations with first principal foundations for asset monitoring. With this highly customizable and scalable analytics solution, operations supervisors, plant managers, operators, and engineers can improve asset reliability and performance with increased operational visibility. They can easily navigate between enterprise, site, area and asset views; track vital health metrics, alerts and trends within each phase of the hierarchy; compare multiple assets in a single view; and edit existing or create new equations for key metrics.
Process or hybrid industries incur a high cost- often millions of dollars- due to unexpected production stoppages or shutdowns from failing equipment. However, operators, engineers, or maintenance managers can avoid unexpected shutdowns and facilitate improved maintenance dispatch by leveraging an analytics solution that predicts failure stages via modelling. Here, the model predicts failure probability for a hydrocarbon gas compressor by plotting bearing temperature difference and oil filter pressure drop. By visually tracking progressive levels of approaching failures (green to red), operators can track specific failures, urgency, and confidence in that urgency for multiple equipment at scale.
Process manufacturing industries such as cement need to maximize throughput of a product in a unit (e.g. cement kiln) within environmental, quality and processing limits. Operators and engineers can leverage advanced process control to see everything moving in the cement kiln, visualize the soft/hard constraints per optimization variable, and even adjust limits or targets per variable thereby driving operating performance.
Rockwell’s IIoT Analytics Solutions Position Manufacturers for Success
Rockwell Automation is strongly positioned to scale business impact for Industrial manufacturing organizations with purpose-built IIoT-based analytics solutions and help them rise to the challenge. Being at the forefront of industrial innovation since 1903, Rockwell has successfully delivered hundreds of industrial analytics implementations for scores of high-impact use cases across process, discrete, and hybrid manufacturing industries. As a result, their customers have routinely achieved solid outcomes such as $2.5M increase in revenue, 15% increase in production rates, 42% reduction in quality variability, and up to 12% increase in energy efficiency.
Rockwell Automation’s industrial analytics solutions offer a full-service customer journey- from building a solid industrial data management foundation to single-pane-of-glass views, to deploying self-service machine learning models at the edge or in the cloud. They cover it all- strategy, software, hardware, implementation, support, and an extensive partner ecosystem- eliminating the risk of disconnect between multiple solution providers. Click here to learn more.
Catch more insight from Rockwell Automation in Episode Three of LiveWorx 2021: The Limited Series, airing live June 24th.
