New glue for age-old gaps
Software architectures promise to bridge the gaps between plant, enterprise, and supply chains
By Dan Sussman, contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/1/2002 6:00:00 AM
In many ways, "collaborative manufacturing" is merely the latest incarnation of the decades-long quest to integrate business and manufacturing systems inside an enterprise and extend the reach of that unified information to suppliers, customers, and other partners. But before dismissing collaborative manufacturing as a meaningless catch phrase, skeptical users should take a close look under the hood at its architectural underpinnings. They might be very surprised.
What they're likely to find are new architectures based on proven computing standards along with emerging Web services that are championed by Microsoft, Sun, and other major technology providers. As a result, say vendors and analysts, it is possible to share real-time data from the plant floor through the supply chain relatively easily, resulting in quick return-on-investment.
While vendors such as Wonderware Corp., Lake Forest, Calif., and West Allis, Wis.-based Rockwell Automation still tout the benefits of their industrial automation and plant management software applications, they're also waxing enthusiastic about their new standards-based frameworks. In the case of Wonderware, its framework, called ArchestrA, also is shared by other units within parent division Invensys Production Management, Herndon, Va.
In fact, nearly every major vendor in the industrial automation software space, including ABB, Wickliffe, Ohio; and Siemens Energy & Automation, Alpharetta, Ga., has put forth some type of standards-based integration framework. Additionally, vendors that offer manufacturing execution system (MES) software packages, such as Robesonia, Pa.-based CIMNET, also tout standards-based integration frameworks. As a result, vendors contend, they are able to deliver integrated, low-risk solutions.
However, says Greg Gorbach, a research director with Dedham, Mass.-based analyst firm ARC Advisory Group, manufacturers' experience concerning vendors' claims has made them skeptical. "Manufacturers are perceived as conservative, although they might be more aptly described as relentlessly practical," Gorbach says. "This tendency has served them well over time and has protected them from the technologies' threats and false promises."
But, Gorbach quickly adds, "This time, it's different. It's not just a futuristic vision. This technology is available and attainable, and manufacturers' competitors will employ it to improve their operations and customer service levels."
The rationale
These new architectures perhaps are having their greatest impact at the MES level. MES serves as the mediator between plant-floor automation systems and business systems. Because the plant floor and the enterprise view the business from entirely different perspectives (real-time events and flows at the production level versus a transaction orientation at the enterprise level) integrating these domains typically is among the major stumbling blocks to creating a single, production-focused network inside and outside the plant. Here too, new architectures promise to allow users to bridge these domains more easily.
The development of architectures that facilitate communication among a wide variety of applications and systems follows similar initiatives that began taking hold on the plant floor nearly a decade ago. At that time, users were frustrated by the fact that many vendors were protecting their market share through use of proprietary data structures and communications protocols in supervisory systems, devices such as programmable logic controllers, and instrumentation. In the mid-1990s, however, a number of major vendors banded together to develop OLE for Process Control (OPC), a standard communications architecture for plant-floor devices. Similarly, the process industries have rallied around a handful of standard architectures for communication among supervisory control systems and instruments. These include Foundation fieldbus, Profibus, and several others.
Generally, the new integration architectures also support eXtensible markup language (XML) and Web services. Under the Web services concept, self-describing chunks of software, leveraging XML and other Internet standards and protocols, are used to facilitate the sharing of data between disparate systems.
The rationale behind Invensys's ArchestrA and its high-level design is typical of the path being followed by a number of vendors. Tim Sowell, vice president of product management for Wonderware, described ArchestrA not as a product, but rather as a "platform of enabling services and technologies" based on existing Microsoft services and emerging Web services "that enable us to build products and solutions for different industries very effectively." The company lists more than a dozen services the framework provides, including alarm and event subsystems, plant history, application distribution, version management, and support for OPC and SQL.
Invensys states that, by building ArchestrA services into its information and automation products and systems, users don't have to deal with the complexity of underlying technologies; instead, they can focus on building the applications they need to improve their businesses. Products and systems inherently will be able to recognize each other and share data.
"The way I like to characterize ArchestrA is as an industrialized version of Microsoft's .NET services," says Mark Davidson, an Invensys vice president. "The good news is that, as Microsoft continues to develop .NET using standards like XML, Simple Object Access Protocol [SOAP], and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration [UDDI], then it all will be less de facto Microsoft. We're just going to ride that wave along with Microsoft."
Dan Lazzari, marketing director for MES solutions for Rockwell's Rockwell Software brand, provides a similar explanation of its FactoryTalk framework, which he describes as a number of technologies that deliver "information-sharing capabilities and visibility across multiple devices and multiple applications.
"FactoryTalk functions at the control level with software products such as RSLogix [Rockwell's family of ladder logic programming packages] and RSLinx [a communication server for plant floor connectivity]," Lazzari continues. "FactoryTalk works on that level in all of our products and any of our competitors' products that adhere to the FactoryTalk standards. Then, if we move up to the operations space, FactoryTalk is a shared way to describe shop-floor operations based in the ISA's S95 specifications [for data sharing among manufacturing and enterprise systems]."
XML looms large
Like Invensys' ArchestrA framework, FactoryTalk is built on Microsoft technologies and Web services. While Web services involves a whole stack of standards and protocols, including UDDI and SOAP, the technology embedded in all of these architectures that is drawing the most attention is XML.
XML documents not only contain data, but also provide information on how that data should be understood and handled by other applications. Consequently, XML-formatted documents serve as the "glue" that can hold various applications together in a loose, quickly developed federation.
This capability is critical to data sharing among plant-floor and enterprise-level systems, says Ian Stone, an executive vice president for CIMNET. The vendor's Factelligence MES, released early this year, structures data in XML format.
Until now, moving data from the plant floor to enterprise systems has been anything but automatic, since enterprise systems usually need to process each record from the plant floor as a transaction, says Stone. As a result, MESs would have to map each piece of data to a particular field in an enterprise application. A change in applications or data structure would require remapping.
"But with XML data, the whole process is a lot more dynamic," Stone says. "Since XML files describe themselves to a receiving application, plant-floor and MES systems can talk to a broader range of enterprise systems, and lot more quickly. There's no need to invent a file structure that both systems have to conform to."
The migration to new architectures was not simply the result of vendors wanting to embed the latest and greatest technologies in their systems or open up their architectures to all comers. Instead, it largely was driven by manufacturers facing the challenges of heightened customer demands and the need to increase revenues, cut costs, and reduce cycle time in an increasingly complex manufacturing environment. In a recent report on collaborative manufacturing, ARC Advisory Group states, "It is not uncommon to find operations with 1,500 to 2,000 differing products being built, with annual volumes ranging from a few hundred to more than 50,000 units. As the product mix grows, so do plant inefficiencies, and the production cell performance stalls."
According to Rockwell's Lazzari, this situation has resulted in a huge upsurge in interest in collaborative manufacturing among users. "At the recent conference of the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association [MESA], an analyst put up a study from a recent conference in which attendees were asked to rate collaboration in terms of importance to them. About 90 percent rated it as very important or business-critical," he says.
Because users can "plug" applications and hardware into their systems incrementally, they can evolve their plant systems in a modular way, with less financial risk.
Are we there yet?
In addition, architectures that accommodate data exchange among a broad selection of applications and systems are essential in an era of global acquisitions and divestitures. Invensys' Sowell pointed to Daimler Chrysler as a company extremely interested in ArchestrA as a way to transfer its knowledge from plant to plant around the world.
"They might have plants in Detroit doing robotics and paint shop applications where the expertise resided in Stuttgart, and yet another application involving welding machines in Japan. Daimler Chrysler wanted to merge all of that expertise into a band of domain knowledge that could be applied, no matter where the company operated in the world," says Sowell.
Most of these architectures are new (e.g., Invensys offered a first look at ArchestrA about a year ago, while Rockwell announced FactoryTalk earlier this year), so there are few examples of customers' gaining benefits from them yet. However, Rockwell has installed FactoryTalk-based applications at its Allen-Bradley manufacturing plants in Twinsburg, Ohio, and Dublin, Ga. Rockwell claims that use of these products and architectures has resulted in a 40-percent decrease in work-in-progress and a substantial reduction in time and effort spent on reporting.
ABB, which offers a broad range of industrial automation hardware and software, developed its Industrial IT framework as a means of integration among its own products, third-party applications, and plant-floor controllers and devices. For example, in June, ABB announced that Atlanta-based Georgia Gulf Corp. would install Industrial IT solutions for its PVC plant in Plaquemine, La.
The project at the Plaquemine complex involves the replacement of an existing industrial automation system installed in 1976. The new system will contain 4,300 input/out (I/O) points to control and monitor the process, with deployment of new operator stations, plant-floor controllers, I/O modules, and batch management software from ABB—all of which communicate using the Industrial IT framework.
ABB also has struck alliances with vendors of supply chain management and enterprise suite software to use Industrial IT as a means of passing data to the enterprise level, and vice versa. Under the architecture, ABB and its partners use ABB's Aspect Objects technology to access and view data from their respective systems.
While the migration to new automation architectures is aimed at improving life for customers, some vendors acknowledge there have been benefits for them as well. Invensys, Rockwell, and Emerson Process Management (parent company of plant intelligence software provider Intellution, Foxboro, Mass.), all have acquired companies, and therefore must absorb their products and services and wrap them into coherent solution sets under their corporate umbrellas. Embedding the new architectures in new versions of products from multiple arms of the same company can simplify the creation of those solutions.
"Yes, that's true, but at some level, it's the 'inside story' that customers really don't care about," says Invensys' Davidson.
Jack Maynard, a research director with Aberdeen Group, a Boston-based analyst firm, agrees with this assessment. "If I'm the customer, I don't care about the software vendor's stake in this. The value has to be for the consumer of the technology. If it's not, then the vendor is working this whole issue wrong."
| Who's inside | ||
| ABB: www.abb.com | CIMNET: www.cimnetinc.com | Intellution: www.intellution.com |
| Invensys Production Management: www.invensys.com | Opto 22: www.opto22.com | Rockwell Automation: www.rockwellautomation.com |
| Wonderware: www.wonderware.com | Siemens Energy & Automation: www.sea.siemens.com | |
