Notes on plant infrastructure
Kevin Parker, editorial director -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/1/2002 12:00:00 AM
It's invariably said that the biggest hurdle facing any new technology or business application is cultural, that people are resistant to change. And while this line of discussion is a neat way of dodging any difficult-to-understand technology issues, there's also a grain of truth therein. One has to wonder how healthy the relationship is between plant-floor engineers and the IT department when, sitting in on a focus group held by a major automation vendor, one hears the plant-floor guys speak gleefully of how the huge amounts of real-time data they have at their disposal are enough to bring any business network to its knees. Parenthetically they add that they know just how they would do it.
By the same token, most plant people would say that—given the large IT investments made by corporations large and small over the last five years—the plant floor has been woefully short-changed. Anecdotal information aside, the slow growth of manufacturing execution systems compared with other categories of applications, such as enterprise or customer relationship management systems, seems to verify this assertion.
Today, most of the execution system vendors that emerged over the last decade have been acquired by the major automation vendors as part of what seems to be their grand scheme.
The leading automation vendors—including ABB, Rockwell Automation, Invensys, Honeywell Industry Solutions, Emerson Process Management, and Siemens—have all said that in the next several years leading manufacturing and process companies must choose a single plant information infrastructure and global services provider. The automation vendors believe increasing involvement in the capture and control of intellectual capital is the surest way for them to grow their business. This is especially so since many automation products have become increasingly commodity-like.
The need for manufacturing and process companies to choose an architecture from a single automation vendor is driven by a combination of technology and business reasons. It is said that keeping the different domains within the manufacturing enterprise separate has led to a costly focus on ad hoc integration. Or take the example of a company in which all the plants use automation technology from a single vendor, excepting one, which uses another vendor's systems. The corporate lack of expertise in the anomalous systems is a substantial business problem.
The automation vendors seek to step into the breach left by the starving of in-house corporate engineering services. The automation vendors believe they are well-positioned to provide these services on an outsourced basis.
The integration architectures will serve as a platform for the development of advanced management software applications, culminating in systems that seamlessly combine plant operations and asset management.
No one likes being held captive—the love/hate relationship users have with Microsoft and SAP is testimony to that—but the big plus of plant IT infrastructures will be to eliminate or drive down the tremendous costs associated with ad hoc integration.
