Operational Technology Viewpoints

​​​​​​​Suiker Unie is a sugar manufacturing company based in the Netherlands that started its “ Digitalization in Practice ” journey back in 2011, with the stakeholders creating a vision for the future. 

The phrase “fail fast” is increasingly finding its way into conversations about industrial digital transformation and Industry 4.0.  The implication seems to be that fail-first is a necessary component of a digital-first industrial work culture.

“The harvest” explained the engineer.  “It’s our busiest time of year.  Everyone is buried dealing with glitches in the ERP system when deploying spare parts or doing root-cause analysis on warranty claims. No one in IT will agree to system testing during the harvest.”

As today’s industrial maintenance organizations are becoming more sophisticated and operating under more stringent service-level agreements and expectations, their maintenance teams continue on a quest to be more efficient and effective.  To this point, awareness and interest in EAM wearables are building.

Deficient quality control is a primary reason for product recalls in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry. Replacing legacy quality control systems, particularly inspection systems with foremost smart machine vision technologies, has been critical in mitigating such product recalls.

Servitization allows OEMs to provide proactive support to prevent production disruptions at their customers.  Owner/operators should add servitization for OEMs to their selection criteria.

Arnold “Marty” Martin is Director, Process Control Technology at Air Liquide USA.  As we learned during his presentation at ARC’s February 2019 Forum in Orlando, Florida, his company has been hard at work moving with its customer-centric, “NEOS 2016–2020” initiative. Fundamentally, it is a digital transformation of process control (Industry 4.0) initiative.

Record New Pharmaceutical Approvals was One of the Drivers for new BMS Purchases

I recently attended the second day of the Best Practices for Chemicals conference earlier this month in Houston, Texas.  Much of the messaging focused on digital transformation for chemicals and its benefits.

Like the Y2K millennial bug, there is some concern the Week Number Roll Over for GPS receivers has the potential to cause some disruption of electrical and process control systems on the rapidly approaching date of April 6, 2019.