I'll be posting catchup from Automation World too, but I got up early this morning and flew to Savannah for one of the most important meetings I attend every year, the Control System Integrators Association. CSIA is the organization that has created the discipline of control system integration, and made it real. They made it so real that the big vendors have all tried to have their own integration divisions, with varying success. But the CSIA is growing annually--they are over 300 members now, with many of them having passed the third-party certification audit that CSIA designed.
I missed the morning session this morning, but I will post from their presentations. The first one I physically made was Rick Dolezal's talk, "Plant Automation in the Future."
He started out with where we were, 30 years ago, giving us a walk down memory lane.
It was 1978
You had time to bid a job
Pulse tone phones
Vinyl records
Gas station bell
You could fix your TV at the drug store
No one knew what Microsoft was
Chat rooms included:
Dinner table
Front porch
Amateur or CB radio operator
What problems did we have 30 years ago??
Communication between plants and the home office
High inventories, no real time insight into the marketplace
Automation was limited, data from plant floor was hard to come by
Energy costs
Discrete and process manufacturing operated on separate systems
Specifically?
Plants and Manufacturing sites:
Had many systems running individual factory operations
Hadn’t merged process and discrete manufacturing processes
Had little insight into what was happening on the factory floor
Controlled many processes manually
Energy costs were skyrocketing
How did we solve those problems?
More data
New technologies
New approaches to plant operations
A new breed of plant operators
What problems do we have now?
Less people
Same or fewer assets
Increased demand for:
more production
less waste
more efficiency
improved tracking
quality
Standards
Mix of equipment within a plant for process and discrete
Energy costs
Insight into front office and plant floor goals
How will we solve those problems?
Same way:
More data
New technologies
New approaches to plant operations
A new breed of plant operators
Data Drivers:
All systems are linked
Your password is your master key, one login for all system access
Data on all plant projects is entered one time
Customers know what they need based on changing purchasing patterns, even the weather
Control to Profit
Real-time performance management (RPM) and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) measures are calculated automatically and drive performance improvements
Extensive use of RFID to track production, people or equipment
Wireless
Sensors
Power
Plant Artificial Intellegence makes routine decisions, freeing plant personnel to take a broader view of plant operations
Self diagnosing
Equipment can submit its own corrective or preventive work orders
Scheduling of maintenance
Product variability is lessened through adaptive advanced control
Putting blocks of applications modules together – no custom code
There will be no more PLC and DCS systems, just one Plant Automation System
Paper is gone – all electronic data records
All applications will be fully simulated before they are built
Applications will be designed to a target and modeled beforehand allowing an efficient match of hardware, control system and the application itself
No downtime
No more control rooms
All employees will wear visual display glasses with work instructions, real time-trends and alarms, presentation is unique to individual / area
Smaller plant cells, highly adaptive
Greener – plants will burn their own waste for fuel, lights out manufacturing, reclamation of energy in all plant operation
Lights and all building services turn on only when needed
Better diagnostics and explanations of what to do what to do when anomalies happen
Robots will take the place of workers in hazardous areas
We can work anywhere
Work from wherever our PDA is
We can make items anywhere, and a renewed focus on local manufacturing will further reduce costs and increase just in time delivery
This may be the resurgence of many cottage industries
Ebay
Many production centers that make specialty items
All supplier information will feed into the plant control system………that system will then feed information to the customer
All information will continuously be kept up to date (patches, firmware releases)
Work would cycle back to proactive (from reactive)
Plant operators of the future (the iPod generation)
There will be a Manufacturing Management degree combining electrical engineering, accounting, manufacturing, business and computer systems
Engineers will respect IT and even ask them to come to meetings.
IT will value and request engineering input
These two groups may become so intertwined as to become indistinguishable.
There will be a high degree of automation as the world rapidly globalizes, the availability of “cheap” skilled human labor will dry up
With all this automation, operators will have much more time to optimize the process
Biometric information will act as login information
Information will only have to be entered once and will automatically populate to relevant areas
Standards allow more productive use of automation professionals
So what will stay the same?
The balance between open low-cost systems and security
Goal will be to build applications fast, and the next one faster
He who makes it easiest to config …..Wins!
People who understand business processes and the means of making them occur – will be in high demand
The person who knows how something works will always have a job, but the person who knows why something works that way, will be their boss
So what should we be doing?
Expand your boundaries – go to the other groups within your company and spend time there
Embrace new technologies
Implement standards
Embrace other disciplines
Embrace youth
Challenge them
Include them
Get out of your plant/manufacturing facility
Get an iPod
Try new things and experiences
Commit earlier
Take full advantage of incremental gains – short passes
Our goal, to turn dreams … into Realities
