Operations and Maintenance Teams Enabling IIoT Technology

Adding more sensors or “things” to applications or processes begs the question: Who’s responsibility is it to analyze these data points within an enterprise? This is the IT/OT convergence debate happening in some manufacturing circles.

From a recent blog post at Paula Hollywood’s outpost at the ARC Advisory Group’s IoT site, she writes:

If engineering has primary responsibility for asset-related data, it should also be included to provide a single model of automation and operations management. In order to gain maximum benefit from convergence, enterprises must move beyond simply automating and integrating production processes to automating and integrating workflows with business processes including plant engineering in a common information infrastructure.

Asset management can be a pain point but more companies are moving towards distributed monitoring of KPIs, operation parameters and machine health. The lynchpin for distributed monitoring for operations and maintenance teams  is “light” infrastructure solutions via industrial networking in certain cases, see below:

The app and monitoring platform allow Southwest Baking to use this browser-based software from Opto 22 to build mobile monitoring interfaces and then allow production personnel to login via smartphone or tablet. The food manufacturer leans on all of its employees, both management, and operators, to monitor 11,000 lbs./hr. of frozen product runs according to KPIs.

“We use it (monitoring platform) strictly [for] indicators, and it’s meant to be more than a HMI,” says Rob Wroblewski, plant engineer at Southwest Baking. “We don’t use it to actually control food processing; just for data in a useable format.”

The automation platforms and technology have converged also and solutions can be implemented to help operations and maintenance staffs immediately.

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