Intelligent integration

Look at the typical factory floor, and it's not difficult to spot evidence of significant investment in IT. Operatives busily reviewing the contents of HMI and SCADA screens, for instance. Or barcode data capture systems, ERP terminals and time and attendance systems, each hard at work, performing their intended role. IT, in short, is everywhere. Yet for the casual visitor, used to office-based IT systems, it's easy to make a fundamental mistake about the nature of that very visible investment in IT. Namely, the assumption that there's a high degree of inter-connectedness. But in fact, says Kevin Luxton, founder and chief executive of QiSOFT, a specialist provider of a suite of factory-floor productivity and quality solutions, it quite often turns out that nothing could be further from the truth. "Look closely, and what you're generally seeing is people reading data from one system, and re-keying it into another – with all that this implies for productivity, data errors, and lack of synchronisation," he notes. "And when there is integration, it's usually around the physical nature of the manufacturing process, and not the needs of the people seeking to manage and improve that process." And as an example, he posits a typical process industry operation, such as a papermaking plant. As usual, IT is everywhere, and HMI and SCADA screens abound. Indeed, without such screens – and the networks of sensors, programmable logic controllers, valves, motors and pumps to which they are connected – controlling the plant would be almost impossible. But a lot of what could actually be improved about the management of the plant's operation, he stresses, doesn't come from those systems that are presently integrated with those HMI or SCADA screens. Or indeed, from any data source readily available to factory-floor management through IT integration. "Has production been held up, due to the non-availability of raw materials — yet all the time, those materials have just arrived on-site, unknown to factory-floor management? Alternatively, have problems been caused by non-conforming material being released for production, when it should have been quarantined? Were periodic quality problems associated with particular raw materials, sourced from a particular supplier on a price-opportunistic basis? Links with ERP, SRM and quality systems could provide such insights – but only if those links first existed," says Luxton. Indeed, he adds, from time and attendance systems to finite capacity scheduling solutions, and from quality systems through to supplier relationship management (SRM) systems, examples abound of missed opportunities to either manage production better, or boost productivity, or eliminate problems — provided that links are built between the relevant systems involved, and the systems used by factory-floor management and operatives. "In order to truly succeed in today's competitive manufacturing landscape, the next generation of manufacturing decision-makers are going to require access to a wholly different set of applications than those used by their predecessors," emphasises Luxton. "The operators of tomorrow are going to need to make a far broader set of decisions – going beyond the boundaries of traditional process control – and will consequently need to have access to the knowledge and insight required to support those decisions." So what's the problem? Why aren't those links in place – or being built? The answer, he suggests, is sloppy thinking, and a poor understanding of the opportunity. "People aren't strategising in the right way," he says. "Whether it's manufacturers or IT vendors, they're approaching the issue from the standpoint of where they are today, rather than thinking things through from first principles." Take material availability, for instance, or the accidental release of non-conforming materials. In both cases, conventional wisdom has material status communicated to relevant parties – quality, materials control, purchasing and so on. And factory-floor management, in the form of the operatives and first-line management running the process operation where the material is to be used, simply aren't seen as needing to be in the loop. Yet that's clearly an erroneous assumption, with a genuine risk existing of line stoppages or production taking place using non-conforming material. In short, says Luxton, what's missing is a view of data flows from a 'customer-supplier' perspective – where the 'customer' is the person or system wanting the data in question, and the 'supplier' is the system possessing that data. "Operatives and factory-floor management don't get asked what they want by way of data sources," he notes. "If the purchasing people are buying in materials based on price, but which cause running problems of quality problems, that information is difficult to get at." So what's the solution? Perhaps surprisingly, Luxton isn't an advocate of 'anything goes' integration. "Integration on its own isn't a strategy," he stresses. "The strategy, from a business perspective, is: 'How do we reduce costs? How do we improve productivity? How do we raise quality?' Integration is the answer to those questions, and not a strategy in its own right." Instead, he advocates developing an architecture which facilitates integration where integration makes sense, but which doesn't posit integration for integration's sake. "The most value comes from creating an operationally-driven IT architecture based on integrated, end-to-end software solutions, that can transcend silos to unify operations and create visibility and transparency across the enterprise," he argues. "The key to success is in providing inter-operability between existing business and manufacturing systems, thereby facilitating the analysis of real-time information, performance monitoring, and allowing the identification of problems before they become a crisis." In short, the way forward is to view integration — especially on the factory floor — from a data flow perspective, mapping 'customer-supplier' relationships, and seeing where decision making could be intelligently improved by providing access to data not presently available. Indeed, rather than 'integration' as a focus, Luxton prefers to think in terms of 'intelligence', with the 'customer-supplier' relationship focused on delivering actionable insights, in real time, so as to enable factory-floor operatives and management to make different decisions from those which they would otherwise reach. "The plants that will thrive in the future will do so by transforming their manufacturing data into real knowledge and actionable intelligence, gaining the insight required to optimise process performance, increase productivity and reduce costs — all leading to great customer satisfaction and higher profits," he points out. In some quarters, he adds, this is termed 'manufacturing intelligence' — an enhancement of the traditional manufacturing execution system, pulling in data from a broader array of sources, and using analytics to drill down to see the causes of factory-floor problems. "Manufacturing Intelligence solutions are helping bridge the gap between production and business environments. The continuing presence of inflexible legacy systems is facilitating the use of intelligent analytics to reduce complexity and simplify decision-making," he notes. "Manufacturing Intelligence solutions provide a seamless enterprise-wide, real-time visibility of information — at the same time reducing or eliminating reliance on traditional manual data process analysis." In short, in terms of integration, it's a far cry from today's fragmented factory-floor systems and information silos. But, concludes Luxton, it's what the future needs to look like.