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Welcome to Industree 4.0 for September 2020, exclusively sponsored by SAP. We lead off with a great article from Mike Censurato of SAP. That is followed by regular columnists Pat Dixon and Jim Thompson. We'll wrap with other perspectives from around the industry. |
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By Mike Censurato, Solution Manager, SAP Environment, Health and Safety solutions.
Mike is a solution expert focused on SAP EHS and other applications with 20 years total experience in the EHS/Sustainability software space.
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Keeping Workers Safe in the Mill: COVID-19 Puts EHS Front And Center |
Workers and the environment in which they work have always been a critical part of production in the paper and packaging industries – and keeping them healthy is a key component in keeping sustainable supply chains running at a time of COVID related shortages and disruption.
Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) is a discipline designed to help organizations minimize harm to workers and the environment. In practice, it’s about ensuring compliance as a baseline, and proactively managing risks. And what poses more workplace risk today than the spread of coronavirus?
If you’re like most organizations that run large plants or facilities, you probably already have an EHS program in place. Ideally, the processes and systems that support your EHS program are robust and flexible enough to accommodate new risks that emerge. Whether your facilities are just coming back online or you’ve been operational throughout the crisis, your EHS program is likely being tested like never before.
The role of wearables and the data they can provide
Critical to success is gaining control over your EHS data. Today’s best practice is to centralize data in the cloud for enterprise-wide visibility and analysis. With proper control over relevant EHS data, your organization can move forward with technology solutions that help advance the EHS agenda.
Take for example, IoT solutions that help to enforce mandated social distancing policies in the mill. One leading use case involves the use of wearable sensors that trigger alarms when workers get too close. Another is the use of IoT sensors to continuously monitor air quality throughout worker shifts. These sensors can track temperature, humidity, and particulates in the air that could potentially increase the risk of transmission.
With control over your EHS data, you can also perform the analysis required for continuous improvement. Which policies are working, and which need to be revised to improve EHS performance? You can also apply machine learning algorithms to identify patterns that would otherwise go undetected by the human eye. Not only does this help you improve over time, it can also help you anticipate changes with a fast-moving and unpredictable virus – allowing you to take the actions necessary to minimize infections, ensure worker safe, and keep supply chains humming.
Integration, visibility and PPE
Increasingly, integration with other key business systems is emerging as a critical success factor for EHS. Shop floor systems for EHS need to be integrated with the rest of the enterprise for total visibility. The need for integration is also making itself known as EHS professionals hunt for adequate levels of personal protective equipment (PPE) in many plants and factories today. This requires access to enterprise data – purchase orders, inventory levels, shipments in transit, and more.
In addition, integration – along with adequate data visibility – is important for speedy audits. As EHS is so integrally tied up with compliance, connections to business systems and ready access to data can help your organization demonstrate compliance on demand without requiring days of work from your otherwise busy EHS professionals.
Moving forward
New guidelines are being put forth almost on a daily basis, and many of them will eventually become actual regulations. Complying with these evolving requirements will take flexible processes and agile systems. In the near-term, organizations will need to trust their systems to limit legal liabilities and mitigate risk exposure. A robust EHS system can help.
Over the long-term, it seems obvious that – COVID or not – the EHS risk landscape will continue to evolve. New infectious diseases may emerge, and other risks may present themselves. Indeed, some of these risks may result directly from mitigating policies implemented to address immediate concerns. For example, as masks are mandated in the workplace, some organizations are reporting increased risk of slips and falls as workers attempt to perform their duties with fogged-up eye wear.
The point is that EHS risk can emerge from anywhere. What’s needed are robust systems that capture all relevant data and support the flexibility required to respond to emerging issues.
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By Pat Dixon, PE, PMP
President of
www.DPAS-INC.com, offering project management and engineering for industrial automation projects.
co-authored this month by Jack Bray, former VP of Operations for Domtar
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The first time I was sent to a non-English speaking country, I was excited. I was going to a paper mill in France to help them startup advanced controls. In preparation, I tried to learn enough French to order food. Upon arrival I went to a nice French restaurant. When the waiter arrived, I wanted to set expectations by telling him “Je ne parlez vous Francais”, which roughly and unfortunately translates to “You don’t speak French”. My unintentional insult may have explained the poor service I received afterwards.
Our industry and those associated with it are speaking in very foreign tongues when they land in Industry 4.0 and are really not understanding each other. Are we surprised that the adoption rate of this new era is so low? Any recent survey I have seen shows that less than 10% of industrial facilities can claim to be Industry 4.0, but of course without a definition of Industry 4.0 how can we even assess this?
I am going to give a hypothetical and perhaps extreme case of why any of this matters.
Imagine you are the corporate CTO. The CEO tells you that based on everything we hear from our mills and reports of unscheduled production outages, we need Predictive Maintenance in all of our mills. Since you are a CTO, you know about the cloud, but what is Predictive Maintenance? Naturally, you go to Google to find the answer. You find an article entitled “Industry 4.0 Brings Predictive Maintenance to Life”. (I made up that title, but it is representative of a lot of industry literature). Fantastic! The article says that with Industry 4.0 you can use the cloud to do machine learning, which can predict the health of equipment like your fan pump. You then start looking at your mills to see what needs to be done. The first mill you look at has a distributed control system (DCS). The mill manager sends quarterly reports stating production, operational efficiency, equipment failures, and other pertinent information. Therefore, for this mill you have a lot of work to do. You invest in all of the infrastructure to get this mill connected to the cloud and buy a machine learning package from a vendor to put in the cloud. When that is all done, the CEO asks for the results. The results are costs that far exceed budget and performance that falls well short of expectations. The CEO is understandably disappointed because competitors are getting great results at far lower costs. These competitors know that garbage in equals garbage out, so they invested in their instrumentation and data quality so that machine learning works. If you don’t know what machine learning is, you might not know that data quality matters. Competitors also put machine learning on their DCS so they could get Predictive Maintenance without the cost of additional infrastructure for cloud connectivity. If you don’t know the definition of Predictive Maintenance, you won’t know that it not dependent the cloud. Therefore, Predictive Maintenance is independent of Industry 4.0.
The result of your inability to fluently comprehend the language of Industry 4.0 lead to an epic fail.
The “Industry 4.0 Lexicon” that my committee has been working on is going through the process of becoming a formal paper in a well known industry organization. There is nothing in this lexicon that is specific to the pulp and paper industry; it is written to apply to every industrial sector. The objective is to provide industry with definitions of terms used in Industry 4.0 to mitigate epic fails as I described. If we cannot communicate effectively, epic fails will be the norm. That is why it matters.
Beyond the endless examples of misunderstandings in trade journals, conferences, and casual conversation, I will give 2 cases of YouTube videos which have been widely viewed and may be unintentionally contributing to misunderstanding in industry:
•“Future Manufacturing 4.0” (https://youtu.be/rt65167tZlQ): This video lumps manufacturing processes and labor management into Industry 4.0 and seems to assume that in Industry 3.0 there were no machines, robots, or digital capability
•“What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (https://youtu.be/kpW9JcWxKq0): This lumps non-industrial domains such as politics, economics, medicine, social evolution, and others into the domain of industry. Then, it discusses future hypothetical developments in these domains which have not occurred yet. Non-industrial domains and future hypothetical developments are not germane to the present-day Industry 4.0 era we are in. While this video is compelling, its title does not match its content and therefore obfuscates Industry 4.0.
The “Industry 4.0 Lexicon” is one way to address this, but often videos have more appeal than documents. My counter punch to the obfuscating videos above is:
•“Do We Need an Industry 4.0 Lexicon?” (https://www.tappi.org/education/webinars/do-we-need-an-industry-4.0-lexicon/): When I did this webinar back on 4/29/20, I was not aware of any other video that explained the problem and made an effort to bring common understanding of Industry 4.0.
•“IIoT & Industry 4.0 RANT” (https://youtu.be/0gd4CcZYo9s): Since my webinar, Walker Reynolds of Intellic Integration is the only other person I am aware of that is putting out videos advocating for a common understanding of Industry 4.0. While his definitions don’t always match the “Industry 4.0 Lexicon”, he understands the misinformation in the industry and is an ally in this effort. This video is one of many he has produced on the Intellic Integration channel on YouTube, which I recommend.
The Tower of Babel we are in today can to lead epic fails. The “Industry 4.0 Lexicon” will hopefully collapse the Tower of Babel and help industry advance to the new era with large and sustainable return on investment. Comprenez vous?
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Big Data means Big Changes |
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We recently completed our monthly meeting with SAP. I love these meetings; we talk about so many interesting ideas, really cutting edge material.
As I think back on this recent meeting, if there was a theme, it was the coming applications for "Bid Data." Memory storage is become so inexpensive and algorithms ideas becoming so exciting that major changes will be coming in the near future...changes to matters we would normally think of a mundane.
One of the items I have been thinking about after the call is the production of off-spec product. Every mill makes it, and most dispose of it the same way--through a broker.
Yet think about it, what is off-spec for one customer may be just what another customer needs--the customer and the product have just not met.
Off-spec products will carry all the measured performance criteria as on-spec products, it will just be different. So what if a mill produced a catalog of off-spec lots and on a regular basis (once per month?) had an auction for this material?
Potential buyers could comb through the available lots and bid on them as time goes by, something like "e-Bay." Then at the end of the time period allotted for each lot, it sells to the highest bidder.
This could improve the revenue stream on existing off-spec product, currently sold to a broker with little thought (and for little money).
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Industry 4.0 and the Future of Productivity |
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There are many measures for productivity: perhaps you are hoping Industry 4.0 will lead to lower overhead, greater flexibility or higher quality. Whatever the answer, making Industry 4.0 work for you is not about digital for digital’s sake: it’s about connecting your corporate strategy to the benefits connectivity can provide. |
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Optimizing Machine Performance with Industry 4.0 and Calibration |
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Integrating Industry 4.0 technology into your process may seem like a costly investment at first, but it pays off by keeping your machines running optimally and minimizing costly shutdowns. And while that’s a much newer concept, practices that have been around for decades, including one that’s been around for a century, to properly calibrate machines should be a regular part of your maintenance routine to ensure products meet clients’ specs. Together, these two concepts will reassure your customers as to the quality and reliability of both the product and your ability to produce the order on schedule—while letting you say goodbye to your weakest link. |
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More manufacturing explorers needed |
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By Simon Dawson, Director Industrial Transformation, IMCRC
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Early explorative steps into Industry 4.0 will create value in many ways – excitement within the teams involved, increased organisational creativity, new skills, new ideas spawned that wouldn’t have been spotted otherwise – and allowing these to build alongside financial benefit could be the key to finding your way in a digital world. |
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How to implement an effective remote monitoring strategy in four steps |
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Links to four articles that can start your transformation
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In a world where remote work is the norm and data are the determining factor in decision making, utilizing IIoT technologies that enable machine condition monitoring and predictive maintenance is imperative. Enacting this type of paradigm shift, however, requires more than just installing sensors and collecting infinite amounts of data. You need to determine which assets to monitor, what technologies to use, and how to apply all the data being captured. |
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Industree 4.0 is exclusively sponsored by SAP |
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