CONNECTIVITY & COORDINATION: CASE STUDY
to elucidate a vision for where the company will be in 10 years. There’s flexibility this way, and it’s easier for interested parties to understand what we’re doing,” Hester said. As mentioned, of special interest to the initial project was to demonstrate that meaningful integration could be achieved across all the different CNC machine types at HIROTEC America. Besides being of different types, the 60 machines were also of different vintages. Thus, although CNC technology has only been around for decades, given the current speed of technology development, the machines already represented different technology eras. It was easy to connect the different machines’ device protocols into the common system, Hester said. “Kepware just does it, so there wasn’t any reason for us to dive further into it than that.” However, Hester noted, it’s a truism that “it is the machine that breaks that everyone knows best. We just put everything into Kepware. It worked so well that we didn’t bother to map out the network. We didn’t realize our mistake until we went to add a machine and didn’t have a port for it. Then we had to go back and create the needed network map.”
Other stakeholders One internal stakeholder in the project that Hester and his colleagues were intent on getting support from was the informationtechnology (IT) department. “It was helpful to engage with IT up front. So often, too often, information technology departments have projects thrown over the wall to them and then they are told it was needed yesterday,” Hester said. By engaging with the IT department immediately, departmental as-
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Industrial Internet of Things
sociates were more supportive of the project. “Firewall and server issues were addressed expeditiously, servers came on line quickly, connection to the cloud was made in less than a day,” Hester said. “Audits didn’t have to be performed after the fact.” Another set of stakeholders are the system users. As with the CNC
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The newly implemented
system melds operations and maintenance data, and by doing so, it can help employees identify trends that lead to contextualized,
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actionable insights.
machines, stakeholders are of different types. “If you’re investigating an occurrence, the analysis is timelier and more complete if everyone finds the data in a familiar context,” Hester said. “For a design engineer, that means a CAD or PLM platform, for the operations manager that means SCADA or a manufacturing execution system. The ability to do that for the users was a benefit.” The interface provided both tracks machine uptimes and profiles the complex machine states involved in a way that can be intuitively grasped by operators, engineers, and managers. Engineers can compare the performances of different machines. Investigations can uncover linkages between maintenance anomalies and quality, operations, or production challenges.
Clearly, however, what Hester likes is that “we have a solution that can be scaled to address different challenges.”
Final words Hester is now working on a second IIoT project. At HIROTEC Japan he is helping to develop an IIoT application that involves 50-point inspections of advanced robotic systems. Industrial suppliers of many stripes, Hester noted, are introducing IIoT solutions aimed at specific maintenance or operations challenges. What HIROTEC wanted was an eco-system platform that addressed specific challenges but that also made strategic sense. With the solution, HIROTEC AMERICA increased visibility into its CNC shop processes and has deeper insight into operations. “With small IIoT projects there will mainly be ‘soft’ benefits,” Hester said, “although we’ve measured what we’ve accomplished. Once we were done, the plant and operations managers wanted it on their desktop immediately, as well as a display on the plant floor.” Having CNC machine uptime data improved shop scheduling, based on a solid understanding of past and current states. Manufacturing leverages real-time shop-floor data as an input to the ERP scheduling module, optimizing parts flow to the CNC modules. Greater insight into asset and resource allocations based on smarter questions about priorities helps determine the most effective course of action. The result is improved productivity at HIROTEC AMERICA. IIoT
Kevin Parker is a senior content manager at CFE Media. www.controleng.com/IIoT