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Overview
ARC held its second virtual European Industry Forum on May 17th and 18th. As part of the Forum, the traditional session on manufacturing operations management was held in cooperation with MESA Europe and its Africa chapter. MESA Europe gave a keynote about the new MESA model, linking digital threads of long business processes with that of support processes, asset lifecycles, and enabling technologies. Ian Caister, who setup his own company, explained how he designs and implements bespoke IIoT solutions for a wide variety of needs from SMS, constrained by bandwidth and budget, combining serverless cloud services with custom edge devices based on proven modular hardware architectures. Solution Architect at Saudi Aramco Shashikant Ramsangar explained how the company took a strategic approach combining ISA 95 concepts, corporate vision, and business objectives into an architecture that can be adapted to new needs such as sustainability and enabled by new technologies such as AR/VR or 3D printing.
MESA Keynote and Presentations
Chairman of MESA Europe Uwe Kueppers set the stage with a presentation about the freshly published update of the MESA model. The model helps companies implement manufacturing operations management by providing a generally applicable structure. The idea of the digital thread is applied to so-called “long business processes,” such as “discover,” “create,” “make,” or “sell.” The new MESA model proposes to question which lifecycles, for example “product or production,” cross paths with other lifecycles such as “digital twin or quality,” and how these interactions are important to business objectives before selecting supporting technologies. The result will be to focus attention and provide actionable information such that organizations can make improvements that impact business outcomes. A few publications on the new model are available and many more will follow. MESA invites its member companies to participate in this effort.
4IR For The “Small Guy”
Ian Caister proposed some real-world solutions for SMEs, who are often constrained by budget, IT infrastructure, application knowledge, limited bandwidth, intermittent connectivity, and remote or moving assets. The use cases Ian mentioned are:
- The need to monitor health, charge levels, and status of batteries in industrial applications like forklifts or refrigerated trucks.
- Monitoring and adapting conditions when cell cultures at clients’ sites used for biological crop protection need corrective action.
Ian solved the cloud piece of the puzzle by using serverless or “auto-scaled” cloud services that only generate cost when data flow, or dashboards are used. The cloud architecture is classical with a “cold path” for historical analysis and a “hot path” with instantaneous reporting. The configuration and deployment of such applications require some knowledge and experience and are typically done by an integrator. A typical cost per connection plus dashboard is in the order of €10 per month, which is impressively low.
The hardware side of the puzzle was solved in an original way and involves bespoke edge gateways, made to satisfy the needs for the right-sized network interfaces, protocols, temporary storage and aggregation capabilities. With this “just-what-is-needed” design the costs remain around €100 per device. Cleverly, the devices are combinations of proven components and designs, and have a level of standardization at the module level, which explains the controlled cost, scalability of production and device reliability, comparable with mass customization of consumer products. Responding to a question from the audience, Ian explained that reliability has not been assessed in detail.
Only a few failures among hundreds of installations over several years have been observed, and all of them were related to external factors. Combine this with ThyssenKrupp Material IoT’s solutions for small, poorly instrumented and automated industrial sites, and you have a full smart manufacturing strategy for SMEs.
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Keywords: ARC European Industry Forum, Manufacturing Operations Management, MESA model, Industry 4 for SMEs, Multinational’s Strategic Approach, ARC Advisory Group.