Cisco Rockwell cooperative finds manufacturers want hand holding

The objective, announced at the Hannover Fair in Germany last April, was to cooperate on developing reference architectures and best practice for manufacturers wanting to use EtherNet/IP standard networking. But, according to Paul Brooks, EMEA product manager for networks business Rockwell Automation, manufacturers also want help with language – understanding the roles and challenges in the formerly quite separate groups of production operations and enterprise IT. “Five years ago, it was all about how to ensure reliability of Ethernet on the factory floor, so we were expecting now to be talking about the services we need to integrate factory floor systems with the rest of the business,” recounts Brooks. “But we found we had created a problem for them. As they got more benefit from Ethernet networks on the factory floor, they found they could no longer run them in isolation: they needed to work with the enterprise IT – but they didn’t have the language. “Neither side understand each other’s challenges and objectives. So our mutual customers wanted us to work not just on the technical part but the inter-personal side of integration too.” As a result the pair say they are now working on three distinct projects. The first is defining a common technology view. “Customers don’t want to spend money twice on maintenance tools for the factory floor and then for the enterprise,” explains Brooks. “So we’re working on a common technology view – tools for solving all the factory problems that are the same as the Ethernet view used in the rest of enterprise.” The second part is about producing a reference architecture that describes how Ethernet should be implemented to ensure secure manufacturing on the factory floor. “So this is about the configuration for switches; how they’re tested and proved and so on. Also, as European manufacturers reduce their non-core manning, it’s about how those guys can provide remote maintenance services,” says Brooks. The third part is then the training and education – seminars enabling IT and MES teams to understand each other’s issues, including providing what Brooks terms “emotional tools so the y can cooperate”. Stuart Robinson, who runs the European enterprise manufacturing development team at Cisco, says: “The whole philosophy is to show we can integrate with a factory network so we can start to capture events and data in real time and then integrate those into business applications in the enterprise to allow organisations to develop on the goal of real time manufacturing.” Brooks adds that the outputs will be available to all users – although “the benefits will deteriorate if they’re not Cisco and/or Rockwell user because the ‘how to’, which is where greatest value comes from, will be product and application specific.”