Smart Safety Convergence Increases Productivity and Operational Resilience

Overview

Issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to supply chain disruptions to global geopolitical crises have challenged and changed industry more abruptly than at any other time in modern history. This has drastically impacted the need for manufacturers and processors to accelerate their digital transformation journey from years to weeks in order to respond in real-time to abrupt market changes and become more agile, productive, and operationally resilient, which is the only way that companies can thrive today.  Manufacturers and processors had to initially deal with running their operations remotely with employees working from home, and today struggle to manage their supply chain in an environment where the problem is not consumer demand for their products, it’s the ability to deliver those products. Digital transformation accelerated the ability for physical and organizational boundaries to be broken to engage a real-time workforce, connect teams, and drive collaboration. These companies are also under pressure to manage their supply chains to maintain their integrity and flexibility to respond to market demand shifts; and often doing this from remote locations with the tools to monitor production with real-time visibility and control. There are new methodologies and technologies required, driven by the need to monitor and protect against failures, ensure product fulfillment and high productivity, protect personnel, and do all this while leveraging enhanced safety and security architectures.  This digital transformation acceleration is driving the demand for smart safety solutions, which are now an essential component of a manufacturer’s and processor’s operational resilience strategy and a key enabler to achieve the productivity required to thrive in today’s challenging times. 

The Convergence of Smart and Safety Increases Productivity

The digital transformation journey requires end users and OEMs to obtain much more production and machine information, which means that more industrial components need to have the ability to collect production operations or machine data, process that data into meaningful information, and send that information to the edge, to a control system, to a cloud, or some combination of those options. This has led to the development of smart solutions that have these built-in capabilities to help production lines and machines to be more productive and information-enabled to increase production efficiencies and decrease unscheduled downtime.

Safety continues to increase its importance for manufacturers and processors, especially when these companies discover how safety helps to provide a competitive advantage rather than solely an increase in costs. Besides minimizing risks, increased safety helps these companies to improve productivity and profitability by reducing unscheduled downtime and increasing Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) and Return on Assets (ROA). In addition to helping to protect workers from injuries or potential life threatening situations, such as cutting power while clearing a jammed machine, opening a high voltage machine or panel, or entering a work cell, the time saved by not having to, for example, continuously use the e-stop buttons to resolve machine jamming situations greatly minimizes the frequency and duration of unscheduled downtimes, increases productivity, and provides a quick Return on Investment (ROI).

Integrating safety to leverage the full capabilities and benefits of smart devices, such as gathering and processing data in real-time at or close to the point that the data is gathered, but still able to leverage all safety functionality, represents a convergence of the two technologies. Just as many companies are seeing their OT and IT functionalities converge, these devices used in processing and manufacturing applications are seeing their safety and smart devices converging for the benefit of persons who install, program, operate, and service the automation equipment, such as PLCs, PACs, drives and sensors, as well as the manufacturing assets, such as machinery, material handling equipment, pumps, conveyers, ovens, batch reactors, etc. So, this not only makes these assets safer to operate, but also provides valuable insight as to what is occurring, since the smart devices are designed to gather key data that can be analyzed and leveraged to make the overall production process safer, more efficient, productive, and profitable.

Operational Resilience Requires Smart Safety Solutions

One of the objectives of a company’s digital transformation journey driven by the new normal is to ensure resilient operations to improve its capabilities to overcome business risks, such as increasing cybersecurity threats, new regulatory compliance mandates, and more strenuous plant and personnel safety requirements, all of which drive demand for smart safety solutions.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic and major supply chain disruptions, manufacturers and processors faced numerous challenges, such as market and commodity uncertainty, rapid fluctuations in demand, and the need to become more agile, efficient, and sustainable, all while maintaining a safe and productive working environment. However, the pandemic and supply chain issues magnified those challenges, leading manufacturers and processors to strongly focus on operational resilience as a key corporate objective during the digital transformation process.

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Keywords: Smart Safety Solution Convergence, Productivity, Digital Transformation, OEE, ROI, ROA, Operational Resilience, Supply Chain, IT, OT, PLC, PAC, ARC Advisory Group.