Automation World June 2022

JUNE 2022 / www.AutomationWorld.com

30 OEE AS A TOOL FOR CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT 34 08 11 26 41 36

Sensors Help Increase Batch Capacity New Industrial Control System Security Threat Robot Predictions for 2022 Making the Choice: Cables & Connectors Palletizer Upgrade? It’s Likely Overdue New Products

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CONTENTS 3 AW MAY 2022

JUNE 2022 | VOLUME 20 | NUMBER 6

26

Making the Choice: Cables & Connectors

30

OEE as a Tool for Continuous Improvement

34

Sensors Help Increase Batch Capacity

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Though they don’t often receive the attention given to other automation technologies, cables and connectors are critical to the power and data transmission needs of industry’s digital transformation.

Four real-world application stories show why OEE remains a bedrock manufacturing metric for real-time data collection to enhance companies’ ability to take corrective actions continuously.

Non-contact infrared sensors enabled global plastics and rubber processor Ilpea Industries Inc. to increase yields and reduce cycle times.

5/31/22 1:52 PM

4 CONTENTS AW JUNE 2022

EDITORIAL

ONLINE 6

David Greenfield Director of Content/Editor-in-Chief dgreenfield@automationworld.com / 678 662 3322 Stephanie Neil Senior Editor sneil@automationworld.com / 781 378 1652 David Miller Senior Technical Writer dmiller@automationworld.com / 312 205 7910 Victoria Sanchez Managing Editor vsanchez@pmmimediagroup.com / 571-612-3200 x9298 Jim Chrzan VP/Content and Brand Strategy jchrzan@pmmimediagroup.com / 312 222 1010 x1470 Kim Overstreet Director, Emerging Brands Community koverstreet@pmmimediagroup.com James R. Koelsch, Lauren Paul, Jeanne Schweder and Beth Stackpole Contributing Writers

Exclusive content from AutomationWorld.com: videos, podcasts, webinars, and more

INDUSTRY DIRECTIONS 8

New Industrial Control System Security Threat

BATCH OF IDEAS 10 Moving Robots Into the Matrix

PRODUCTION POINTS 12 Robot Predictions for 2022

PERSPECTIVES 12

ART & PRODUCTION

PackML and Machine-to-Machine Communication Minimizing Machine Downtime with Bluetooth Gateways and Smart Sensors The First Cloud-Native Data Historian Eliminating Data Siloes for Better Cybersecurity Iveco Reduces Worker Injuries with Wearable Exoskeletons

Filippo Riello Marketing & Digital Publishing Art Director friello@pmmimediagroup.com / 312 222 1010 x1200 George Shurtleff Ad Services & Production Manager gshurtleff@pmmimediagroup.com / 312 222 1010 x1170

ADVERTISING

NEWS 18

Kurt Belisle Publisher kbelisle@pmmimediagroup.com / 815 549 1034 West Coast Jim Powers Regional Manager jpowers@automationworld.com / 312 925 7793 Midwest, Southwest, and East Coast Kelly Greeby Senior Director, Client Success & Media Operations Alicia Pettigrew Director, Product Strategy

ABB Showcases Its ASTI Mobile Robotics Field Device Integration Eases Equipment Installation Honeywell Expands Its Forge Software Capabilities Synthetic Data and Artificial Intelligence Combine to Improve Machine Vision Time-Sensitive Networking Plugfest Focuses on Interoperability Beckhoff Showcases Compact Motion Control for Mobile Applications PMMI News The Amazing Packaging Race at PACK EXPO International

AUDIENCE & DIGITAL

David Newcorn Executive Vice President Elizabeth Kachoris Senior Director, Digital & Data Jen Krepelka Director, Websites + UX/UI

NEW PRODUCTS 36 High Payload Industrial Robot Field-Wireable M12 Connectors Safety Switches AC-DC Power Modules and more...

PMMI MEDIA GROUP

Kurt Belisle Publisher kbelisle@pmmimediagroup.com / 815 549 1034 Reed Simonsis Brand Operations Manager rsimonsis@pmmimediagroup.com / 312 205 7919 Sharon Taylor Director of Marketing staylor@pmmimediagroup.com / 312 222 1010 x1710 Amber Miller Marketing Manager amiller@pmmimediagroup.com / 312 222 1010 x1130 Janet Fabiano Financial Services Manager jfabiano@pmmimediagroup.com / 312 222 1010 x1330

INDUSTRY VIEW 40

Siemens Digital Industries Software Focuses on Digital Transformation By Dick Slansky

INTEGRATOR VIEW 41

Palletizer Upgrade? It’s Likely Overdue By Bryan Little

FINANCE VIEW 42

All Automation World editorial is copyrighted by PMMI Media Group, Inc. including printed or electronic reproduction.

Magazine and Web site editorial may not be reproduced in any form without thewritten permission of the publisher.

Creating the Monetary Information to Measure Equipment Efficiency Improvements By Larry White

ENTERPRISE VIEW 43

Manufacturing in the Metaverse By Brian R May

ENTERPRISE VIEW 2 44

Crossing the Great Divide in Industrial Transformation By Diane Sacra

Automation World | PMMI Media Group 401 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 1700, Chicago, IL 60611 Phone: 312 222 1010 | Fax: 312 222 1310 www.automationworld.com

KEY INSIGHTS 46

PMMI The Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies 12930 Worldgate Dr., Suite 200, Herndon VA, 20170 Phone: 571 612 3200 • Fax: 703 243 8556 www.pmmi.org

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6 ONLINE

AW JUNE 2022

PODCAST SERIES How Does a Digital Twin Work in Practice?

Learn how digital twins can be used to represent pieces of equipment as well as entire plant floor operations, the specific value provided by a digital twin to improve production operations, and what industry segments are using this technology most.

AUTOMATION WORLD TV Digital Workflow Tools for Knowledge Transfer Across Operations J.M. Smucker, Covestro, Pretium use digital workflows for factory, field workers.

EDITORS’ INSIGHTS ON VIDEO What is Defense-in-Depth?

As more IIoT-connected equipment makes its way onto the plant floor, defense-in-depth cybersecurity strategies are supplanting perimeter-based approaches.

AUTOMATION WORLD E-BOOK Peer-to-Peer FAQ Sensors

Hear from your peers on how they’re using sensor technologies and AI to improve operations.

ON-DEMAND WEBINARS Manufacturing for Decentralized Energy Storage Learn why ATS Industrial Automation is the partner of choice for battery manufacturing and assembly.

Beyond the Cobot: Post-Deployment Tools to Accelerate Automation

In this webinar you will learn what maximizes the ROI and longterm performance of a collaborative robot after it’s been installed.

See how Universal Robots provides cobot owners with a suite of training, performance management, and service tools to make sure cobot users get the most out of their automation investments.

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8 EDITORIAL AW JUNE 2022

INDUSTRY DIRECTIONS

New Industrial Control System Security Threat

By David Greenfield

dgreenfield@automationworld.com Editor-In-Chief/ Director of Content

A

s part of the Automation World audience, you’re most certainly a user of industrial control systems (ICS) to control your production operations or, at the very least, these technologies are critical components on the machines you use to produce your goods. That’s why you need to heed the latest alert from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) about cybersecurity tools targeting ICS/SCADA devices.

According to the alert, “The Department of Energy (DoE), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have released this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to warn that certain advanced persistent threat (APT) actors have exhibited the capability to gain full system access to multiple industrial control system (ICS)/ supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices, including: • Schneider Electric programmable logic controllers (PLCs), • Omron Sysmac NEX PLCs, and • Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) servers.

The APT actors have developed custom-made tools for targeting ICS/SCADA devices. The tools enable them to scan for, compromise, and control affected devices once they have established initial access to the operational technology (OT) network. Additionally, the actors can compromise Windows-based engineering workstations, which may be present in information technology (IT) or OT environments, using an exploit that compro-

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mises an ASRock motherboard driver with known vulnerabilities. By compromising and maintaining full system access to ICS/SCADA devices, APT actors could elevate privileges, move laterally within an OT environment, and disrupt critical devices or functions.”

Though this alert is primarily aimed at critical infrastructure organizations (e.g., power generation), the technologies listed in the alert are used broadly across industry verticals. Therefore, companies of all types could be impacted. As we saw with the WannaCry and NotPetya attacks a few years ago, the targeting of specific operations by these attacks does not protect non-targeted companies or verticals from their affects.

Eric Byres, CISA ICS advisor and chief technology officer at ICS software cybersecurity firm aDolus Technology says, “This is a classic case of why we need better supply chain transparency and analytics if we want to secure our critical infrastructure from nation states. Many of the underlying issues aren’t in the software Schneider Electric’s engineers created, it is in the third-party code supplied by the CoDeSys Group. They provide CoDeSys Runtime, a framework designed for executing industrial control system software. According to information that used to be [on the] CoDeSys website in 2019 (now removed), the CoDeSys Runtime product has been used in more than 350 devices from dozens of different OT vendors, and is widely used in the energy sector, industrial manufacturing, and Internet of Things systems.”

This could lead industrial users to believe that, if they use Schneider Electric software, they should then look for the vulnerabilities assigned to Schneider Electric products in the National Vulnerability Database. But Byres says companies that do this “won’t find a thing [because] the vulnerabilities are all listed as CoDeSys issues. For example, CVE-2022-22519 doesn’t mention a single product that is affected.”

Byres adds that this CISA alert hints that it is “just the tip of the iceberg” in its statement that: This capability may work against other CoDeSysbased devices depending on individual design and function, and this report will be updated as more

information becomes available.

“There are thousands of industrial facilities across the nation who believe they have dodged the bullet because they don’t use Schneider Electric or Omron products. They haven’t dodged anything—they are just sitting ducks to these nation-state attackers,” Byres says.

There are thousands of industrial facilities across the nation who believe they have dodged the bullet because they don’t use Schneider Electric or Omron products. They haven’t dodged anything—they are just sitting ducks to these nationstate attackers.

See the complete CSIA alert

6/1/22 1:26 PM

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10 EDITORIAL AW JUNE 2022

BATCH OF IDEAS

Moving Robots Into the Matrix

By Stephanie Neil

sneil@automationworld.com Senior Editor

O

tto Motors is a maker of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) used to automate material handling in manufacturing and warehouse operations. The robots are designed to bring materials to and from people, equipment, racks, and shelving in a free-movement manner.

With collaborative capabilities built-in, AMRs are a highly productive way to optimize workflows.

According to the company, Otto robots have the ability to double productivity, but they have to be installed correctly in the first place. Simply using a spreadsheet to figure out how many AMRs are needed in an operation comes with a cost if there are too few—or too many—robots. Even a 20% variable on a fleet of 100 AMR vehicles means that either a customer is not getting what they need or are spending more than they should to achieve what is necessary, which makes for a weaker ROI. But there’s a solution to this problem, and it comes in the form of simulation software.

Matthew Rendall, CEO and co-founder of Otto Motors, was at the Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston in May delivering a presentation on the use of simulation for successful AMR deployments.

“We believe simulation is a critical prerequisite in your toolkit for a large fleet implementation,” Rendall said. “And the reason is that you can be highly granular, highly variable, and very catered to the specifics of not only the layout of the facility, but how your operation changes day by day, shift by shift, and minute by minute. And then you can load all of those parameters into a simulation and model it for a full operation.”

It’s basically a way to start with the end in mind

and mitigate the risk of failure via scenario analysis. The larger the fleet, the bigger the risk. “If you have 100 AMRs on a line, you are probably integrated into mission critical business processes,” Rendall explained. “And if that system doesn’t work, the plant doesn’t work; and if the plant doesn’t work that is catastrophic. So simulation is important for risk mitigation.”

Rendall went on to describe two real customer scenarios, one greenfield deployment and one brownfield. They have some similarities, but in a greenfield project—where you are not dealing with existing infrastructure—the benefits of operational efficiency are very high.

The greenfield site was a 1 million sq. ft. facility covering production and warehousing. It had 300 pickup/dropoff locations and AMRs would perform 5,000 deliveries and cover more than 1,000 miles per day. Because they were starting from scratch, Otto was able to partner with the customer to help them rethink how their manufacturing facility of the future would be laid out.

Then they could simulate scenarios testing for routing, traffic, location, etc.

The simulation is split into two categories, physics simulation and process simulation, with the output of the physics simulation used as an input into the process simulation. Here is where the fun stuff happens.

“We put the robots into the matrix,” Rendall said. “They don’t know they’re in a simulation as the software is fully emulating the environment.

So we teleport the vehicle into the matrix and it’s operating with no knowledge it’s in a simulated environment versus a real environment.”

From there, they can conduct micro-tests to look at interactions and understand how much time an AMR will spend waiting at intersections and pickup locations, for example. These things are validated in the real world and feedback is created in a closed loop micro-simulation to ultimately look at the entire end-to-end process to see how the operation unfolds.

In this case, the manufacturer actually reduced the number of AMRs needed while increasing efficiencies simply by being able to work through each

scenario analysis. “It was originally scoped at 102 AMRs, but with the simulation we were able to optimize the design to 83 AMRs,” Rendall explained.

So while some customers might balk at the thought of spending more upfront on simulation software, there’s real value on the other side. “Invest a little up front in simulation and save 20% of your fleet size through smarter design and more confidence.”

Brownfield simulations have a similar approach, with the fundamental difference being lower degrees of freedom based on decisions that have been made throughout the facility’s lifespan. It is also often dealing with a mix of traffic including forklifts, AMRs, and people. So the approach here is more about how to phase in AMRs without disruption to the operation to minimize downtime.

In either scenario, however, the use of simulation results in the same outcome. “Our position is that a small amount of investment upfront is so important to set the project up for success and make sure you are spending the right amount of money to solve the right problems and mitigate the execution risk associated with going live with an AMR implementation,” Rendall said.

“Invest a little up front in simulation and save 20% of your fleet size through smarter design and more confidence.”

EDITORIAL 11 AW JUNE 2022

PRODUCTION POINTS

Robot Predictions for 2022

By David Miller

dmiller@pmmimediagroup.com Senior Technical Writer

“As technology opens new opportunities for meeting customer demands, new trends emerge that will further drive demand in areas where robots have traditionally not been used.”

A

s labor shortages in the manufacturing industries continue to swell, the uptick in demand for robotics is expected to continue. Moreover, software intelligence is making robots more adaptable, further lowering barriers to adoption and allowing new users to begin automating more easily. The result is a world in which robotic technologies are becoming more ubiquitous than ever before.

“The pandemic accelerated far-reaching global mega trends—from labor shortages and supply chain uncertainty to the individualized consumer and growing pressures to operate sustainably and resiliently—leading new businesses to look to robotic automation,” said Marc Segura, robotics division president at ABB. “As technology opens new opportunities for meeting customer demands, new trends will continue to emerge that will further drive demand in areas where robots have traditionally not been used.”

In particular, Segura identified three key trends that ABB expects to shape demands for industrial robots in 2022.

Trend 1: Electric vehicles will bring changes to automotive manufacturing. As tighter emissions regulations and fuel economy standards drive automotive manufacturers to decrease the production of internal combustion engine vehicles and pivot toward electric cars instead, automotive supply chains may be thrown for a loop.

This is because electric vehicles require many components that internal combustion engine vehicles do not. Most notably, automotive companies will seek to bring the manufacturing of batteries as close to vehicle assembly as possible to meet sustainability requirements. This means new facilities will need to be built. According to Segura, these new facilities will most likely make significant use of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) to enable more modular and flexible production. Segura sees this shift occurring as automotive manufacturing attempts to become more responsive to rapidly changing demand.

Trend 2: E-commerce will create more demand for flexible and mobile robots. With mass customization continuing to sweep over the

consumer goods markets, companies need to find new ways to adapt their production lines and distribution processes to enable personalization in both manufacturing and delivery. Fulfilling these needs will require the adoption of more mobile, flexible, and intelligent robotic technologies.

“This trend will see the growth of lighter, smaller robotic applications, enabling the expansion of automation into new areas of warehousing and distribution operations. As artificial intelligence in robotics matures and learning robots become mainstream, expect to see these technologies deployed alongside AMR technologies, orchestrated and managed by intelligent software to provide enhanced flexibility, speed, and efficiency,” Segura said.

Trend 3: Robots use will expand significantly, requiring worker retraining. At smaller companies that are less-experienced with robot use, more affordable robots that feature collaborative functionality and intuitive programming will continue to proliferate. In particular, highmix, low-volume manufacturers that use CNC machines to produce parts and components for other companies are drawn to collaborative robots because they can work directly alongside human employees to assist in tasks such as machine tending. Moreover, the advances in software intelligence that enable this adaptability and responsiveness could also help robots migrate into new environments such as construction, healthcare laboratories, restaurants, and retail establishments.

According to Segura, as robots become more commonplace in society, widespread education about their use and operation will be required at primary and secondary schools, as well as at colleges and universities.

12 PERSPECTIVES AW JUNE 2022

PackML and Machine-toMachine Communication

By David Greenfield, Director of Content/Editor-in-Chief

T

he PackML automation standard is used in the packaging machine industry to transfer and receive consistent data between machines on a packaging line. While it's well known to machine builders, it offers important lessons for end users in food, beverage, pharmaceutical, and other consumer packaged goods industries.

At PACK EXPO East 2022, Ron MacDonald, R&D expert engineer at Nestlé and chairman of OMAC (the Organization for Machine and Automation Control), which manages the PackML group overseeing the standard, gave a presentation to help end users understand how PackML helps manage packaging line flow to make their operations more efficient.

In his presentation, he explained four key states of the PackML standard: Held, Suspended, Blocked, and Starved.

The 'Held' state indicates that a machine on a packaging line—such as a filler, capper, or case packer—wants to execute its operation, but some factor is holding it back. These factors can vary depending on the product being processed. For example, it could be caused by the temperature of the product; for a case packer, it could be that not enough cartons are available.

The 'Suspended' state in PackML indicates an issue with a machine on the line. Essentially it means that the machine in that state is waiting on another machine on the line to have its issue corrected before resuming function. In this state, the machine can restart operations as soon as the problem causing the issue is addressed, “with no operator intervention required,” MacDonald explained.

As the name implies, the 'Blocked' state in PackML indicates a blockage on the line according to sensor data. “The 'Blocked' sensor is generally the most important performance monitoring sensor on the line,” said MacDonald, underscoring the impact of the 'Blocked' state on packaging line performance.

Likewise, the 'Starved' state indicates that a machine on the line is not getting enough product to perform regular operation.

“All of this matters because labor and material costs are high and end users want to get the most productive use out of their packaging equipment,” MacDonald said. That’s why “OEMs like to build in PackML on their equipment so that they all have the

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same kind of dashboard for communication.”

Highlighting how the PackML states relate to automated machinery on the packaging line, MacDonald used an illustration of a packaging line section between a filler and a capper. “A ‘Blocked’ sensor would be positioned after the filler, while a ‘Starved’ sensor would be placed before the capper to maintain surges or infeed pressures,” he explained. “Surge sensors are positioned in between these two sensors to measure nominal and overspeed flows of product. In a steady state flow of materials between the filler and capper, there will be some stacking of product just before the capper to keep it operating at maximum capacity. However, if something happens to block the flow of product between these two machines, it will trip the ‘Starved’ sensor on the capper.”

A common packaging line situation occurs when the capper gets jammed. In this situation, product will build up, causing the ‘Blocked’ sensor to trip and sending the line into the ‘Suspended’ state. “Once this situation is fixed, the surge function will go into overspeed, causing the capper to worker harder to draw down the accumulation of product, thereby sending the line back to ‘Steady’ state,” MacDonald said. “That’s why it’s important to make sure the machines you choose can comfortably handle overspeed operations for extended periods. Also watch ancillary functions, like printing and labeling applications, when setting overspeed conditions to make sure they can handle this too.”

He suggests addressing overspeed conditions with the OEM to determine the best machine and appropriate settings for your operation.

MacDonald also stressed the importance of defining the bottleneck (rate limit) for your packaging line. “All other machines normally run at the nominal speed of the bottleneck,” MacDonald said, “which is why it’s typically the most expensive and complex machine on a packaging line.”

Noting the importance and roles of the buffer and accumulation process in a packaging line, MacDonald said, “The buffer occurs before the bottleneck and creates a constant flow of product at the infeed to ensure the next machine on the line doesn’t go into the ‘Starved’ state. Accumulation occurs after the bottleneck to ensure the bottleneck has a place to discharge output to prevent choking. Operators may take comfort in the accumulation of product in

front of the machine they operate, seeing it as an indication of work to do, but too much accumulation can flood the system and cause the filler to shut down, which is a situation you want to avoid.”

Essentially, the “whole line needs to work as a family to protect filler operations and ensure it doesn’t stop operation, which means subsequent machines on the line need to be capable of drawing down overflow with overspeed operation,” said MacDonald. “That’s why it’s important to determine usable accumulation in each section of the packaging line during steady state conditions."

In his presentation, MacDonald also detailed the impact of MTBF (meantime between failure, which is machine uptime divided by the number of breakdowns) and MTTR (mean time to repair, which is downtime divided by the number of breakdowns).

He said performing and maintaining these calculations will help address about 80% of stoppages.

“They won’t always address major breakdowns, but they will address most basic line stoppages,” he said.

Listen to this podcast explaining the MTTR and MTBF metrics.

This video captured at PACK EXPO East 2022 highlights BellatRx’s Aquarius Monobloc packaging machine which features servo motion control with Allen-Bradley PLC and HMI standardized using PackML.

In this video, Jim Chrzan of PMMI Media Group speaks with Ron MacDonald at PACK EXPO East about his recommendations to ensure optimal packaging line performance.

6/1/22 1:26 PM

PERSPECTIVES 13 AW JUNE 2022

Minimizing Machine Downtime with Bluetooth Gateways and Smart Sensors

By David Greenfield

Director of Content/Editor-in-Chief

T

hough not a manufacturer, Penn Waste Inc. uses industrial automation technologies to operate and manage its recycling facility which processes more than 180,000 tons of material each year. And just like manufacturers, Penn Waste must confront the issue of equipment downtime.

Recently, the company began seeing its DRS glass breaker machine—which is used to separate glass from mixed recyclables—experience premature failures.

These failures were often attributable to the operating environment, where other recyclable items, such as coat hangers and stringed bags can get caught in the bearings. Such equipment failures required manual intervention to correct and regular, physical inspections to ensure optimal uptime.

“Oftentimes, several maintenance technicians would spend hours performing onsite inspections and cleaning the debris from the machines to reduce the risk of bearing failure,” says Sarah Torjman, senior marketing manager at Cassia Networks. “And when bearings would fail, additional labor was required to investigate the severity of the problem, disrupting many of Penn Waste’s day-today business operations.”

To continuously monitor the bearings in its equipment, accurately predict failure, and avoid the need for manual inspections, Penn Waste chose to implement Cassia Networks’ X1000 Bluetooth Gateways and IoT Access Controller in conjunction with ABB Ability smart sensors supplied by Dodge Industrial.

Penn Waste installed more than 60 Dodge smart sensors on the DRS glass breaker machine to adequately cover all necessary bearings and gear-

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boxes, says Torjman. In addition, two Cassia X1000 gateways were deployed near the machine to continuously receive data from the sensors and send it to the cloud. These gateways are weather-proof and designed for outdoor use. They also feature Cassia Networks’ Pure Scan technology, which is designed to improve scan capability in environments with high background noise and situations requiring many sensors.

“Cassia’s X1000 gateways provide long-range connectivity up to 1000 feet in open space and the ability to pair and connect up to 22 Bluetooth low energy devices simultaneously,” says Torjman. “The long-range connectivity and ability to pair and connect multiple sensors simultaneously was a critical requirement for this deployment.”

Joe Wojciechowski, maintenance manager at Penn Waste, says, “Cassia’s X1000 gateways were simple to use and install and stood to the test in these harsh environments. They provide the long-

range connectivity we need. What one wants from any wireless technology is dependability, efficiency, and durability. Cassia’s gateways and Dodge’s smart sensors have given us just that.”

According to Torjman, the process of installing and commissioning the smart sensors took less than three minutes. “Once the sensors were paired to Cassia’s gateways and a reliable internet connection was made, the gateways were able to seamlessly push data to the cloud, providing Penn Waste with the advanced tools they needed to access data anytime to proactively identify maintenance requirements and prioritize labor tasks accordingly,” Torjman says. “This gave Penn Waste the real-time visibility needed to accomplish their objectives of reducing machine downtime and overall maintenance costs while also improving efficiency.”

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14 PERSPECTIVES AW JUNE 2022

e ir t

o d- ati e ata

i torian

By David Greenfield

Director of Content/Editor-in-Chief

L

ong before Industry 4.0 or any thoughts of storing manufacturing data off-site—let alone in a cloud environment managed by another company—data historians have been a fixture in manufacturing operations of all kinds and sizes. These data historian technologies enabled the logging of production data created by a manufacturing system for storage and retrieval or analysis as needed.

Though arguments over the value of historian technologies were rare, there was never a shortage of complaints about how much data was being captured by these systems while also largely being ignored. This common scenario began to change with the advent of data analytics software, increasingly powered by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, that could automatically sort through all this stored data to find the data points and trends to help direct decision making around production process— and business—optimization.

While many of these AI-powered analytics programs exist in the cloud, the historians sup-

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plying them with data have remained on-premises in manufacturing and processing plants. With GE Digital’s release of Proficy Historian for Cloud in the AWS Marketplace, the on-premises constraints of historians have changed. GE Digital claims Proficy Historian for Cloud is “a best-inclass historian software solution designed to collect industrial time-series and alarms and events data at very high speed” and is the first instance of a cloudbased historian.

How it works

According to GE Digital, Proficy Historian for Cloud provides for “secure encrypted OT (operations technology) data streaming to the cloud designed to reach up to 150,000 values per second per interface and to provide store-and-forward capabilities to protect against data loss if the cloud or network is unavailable. Because it is designed for the cloud, Proficy Historian for Cloud provides the benefits of cloud-based technologies including zero downtime upgrades, data replication,

and high availability. This historian technology is designed to compress industrial data at the source to reduce data transport, as well as compute and storage resources, while enabling plant floor users to query data via tools like Excel and provide the ability to retrieve data from last month or 10 years ago at speed. Operational historians help simplify the task of creating value on the plant floor by performing aggregations like returning the average value over a time period without [requiring users to build] a complex query.”

Steve Pavlosky, director of product management at GE Digital, points out that Proficy Historian for Cloud is not exclusively targeted at manufacturing companies already leveraging cloud-based technologies. “Proficy Historian for Cloud could definitely be a first foray into the cloud for small- or mid-sized manufacturers,” he says. “It offers these companies a cost-effective and lower maintenance approach to managing their OT data.”

Explaining how this new historian technology ensures access to data if a user’s connection to the

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cloud is disrupted, Pavlosky says, “For data collection, the collectors are on-premises and can buffer the data so that even if cloud connection is unavailable, data is still stored locally and transmitted to the cloud when connection becomes available.

The access to historical data from on-premises, however, could be impacted if the cloud connection is lost. We mitigate this risk through three approaches: 1. The cloud historian application itself is designed for high availability and fault tolerance to minimize any application downtime. It utilizes highly resilient managed AWS services that offer 99.9% uptime such as Amazon EKS and Amazon EFS; 2. Customers can choose to set up redundant network connections to AWS to minimize the risk of network failure; and 3. For mission-critical workloads, customers can deploy an additional historian instance on-premises so they can always have access to data locally in case the cloud connection is unavailable.”

Cost structure

Pricing for Proficy Historian for Cloud is available as a term license or a subscription basis. “The term license is based on a flat price per tag and is

desirable by users who want predictability,” says Pavlosky. “The subscription is metric-based consumption pricing with simple sample-based metrics. Typically, IT departments prefer this [because] it involves variable billing based on usage; also, the customer is billed by AWS, which supports their overall IT strategy and investments.”

In line with the current trajectory of automation technology suppliers making most, if not all, of their software available as a service, Pavlosky says the same is true for GE Digital. “We are committed to supporting our customers in their cloud-based initiatives and, in addition to Proficy Historian for Cloud, we also released Proficy Smart Factory—Cloud OEE, as another recent example. Our Cloud OEE software is fully hosted in AWS and managed by GE.” Other GE Digital software currently available via the cloud as a service include: Proficy Operations Analytics, Cimplicity and iFIX HMI/ SCADA, Asset Performance Management, Proficy Manufacturing Data Cloud, Operations Performance Management, and Process Analytics (Digital Smelter, Outage Planning Analytics).

Pavolsky notes that GE Digital’s MES Production

and Quality modules are also available for cloud deployments by customer request.

Application value

To prove the value of its new historian technology, GE Aviation has been using Proficy Historian for Cloud to manage OT data in 32 manufacturing plants. “Managing this amount of data is costly,” said Bill Andrews, technical product manager, GE Aviation. “By moving from 32 distinct deployments to a single deployment of Proficy Historian on AWS, we can dramatically reduce management costs and downtime while improving value, scalability, and reliability.”

GE Aviation expects to reduce infrastructure costs by more than 20% and annual resources by $185,000 using Proficy Historian for Cloud. The company also expects to improve system availability by eliminating more than a month of planned downtime with the help of this software while also establishing a common data store accessible by thousands of its employees.

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16 PERSPECTIVES AW JUNE 2022

Eliminating Data Siloes for Better Cybersecurity

By David Miller

Senior Technical Writer

A

s industrial companies connect plantlevel software and devices to internetconnected systems, cybersecurity has become a critical operations issue for manufacturers of all sizes. While greater systems connectivity expands the efficiency of plant floor operations, it also introduces countless new vectors for potential cyberattacks.

Technology suppliers are increasingly working together to address these plant floor cybersecurity issues. An example of such efforts can be seen in the expanding partnership between Tenable and ServiceNow. Tenable—provider of the Cyber Exposure Platform, which monitors networks, predicts threats, and acts to remediate them—is bolstering ServiceNow’s Now Platform by enabling it to use asset inventory and vulnerability data from Tenable.ot, Tenable’s software module for monitoring OT (operations technology) assets.

This is a key development for the Now platform

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given its focus on eliminating information siloes in operations workflows and associated data by connecting people, functions, and systems on one platform. With Tenable’s Predictive Prioritization capabilities integrated in the Now platform, users can prioritize the IT and OT flaws that pose the greatest risk to their business and then remediate them within a streamlined workflow through ServiceNow’s Vulnerability Response module.

According to the companies, "utilizing Tenable’s unified assessment and remediation guidance, this new integration streamlines asset inventory and centralizes IT and OT remediation workflows across converged industrial environments."

Moreover, by bringing both IT and OT data together in one combined system, Tenable hopes that its integration with ServiceNow will provide methods for visibility and control over OT assets in a manner that is more consistent with those that have been used for IT in the past.

“As industrial networks become increasingly more complex with a mixture of IT and OT, it is more critical than ever to know what assets and vulnerabilities are in your environment,” said Ray Komar, vice president of technical alliances at Tenable. “The days of managing multiple spreadsheets across disparate teams are over.”

Read about Cybersecurity Defense in Depth.

5/31/22 2:03 PM

PERSPECTIVES 17 AW JUNE 2022

Iveco Reduces Worker Injuries with Wearable Exoskeletons

By David Miller

Senior Technical Writer

W

ith examples ranging from 5G-connected hardhats to augmented reality (AR) headsets, wearable technologies are on the rise in industry. According to market research firm MarketsAndMarkets, the global industrial wearable market is expected to grow from $3.79 billion in 2019 to $8.4 billion by 2027. But wearable technologies can be used for more than simply providing AR-enabled remote assistance. Another rapidly expanding application is the use of wearables that improve ergonomics in industrial settings to reduce the likelihood of employee injuries.

According to ergonomics consultants at national insurance carrier The Hartford, employers pay an aggregate of nearly $1 billion per week in workers’ compensation costs. Moreover, nine out of the top 10 most common preventable injuries are linked to musculoskeletal disorders that can be corrected via improved ergonomic practices.

An example of how wearable devices are used to improve worker ergonomics can been seen in the experience of vehicle manufacturer Iveco, which

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has been using Comau’s wearable exoskeleton called Mate in its Brescia, Italy, plant. Here, Mate is used by employees working on the interior construction of minibuses, a task that required they perform many activities while lifting their arms, which can lead to shoulder strain.

“This department features many activities that must be carried out while lifting the arms. A demanding condition in itself, which requires even more attention, considering that the average age of Iveco employees is around 49 years,” said Paolo Gozzoli, production manager at Iveco.

After trying out several different exoskeletons, Iveco chose Mate in 2018. According to Gozzoli, two key considerations factored into the decision.

First, Iveco needed a device that would assist operators in activities involving the upper limbs without reducing their mobility. Secondly, the device needed to be lightweight, particularly in Brescia’s warm summer climate where excessive heat could be uncomfortable or even dangerous. Mate met both criteria, Gozzoli said.

“I have used the Mate exoskeleton for a few months now, and I must say that I immediately found relief, especially for my shoulders. When mounting the reinforcements in the upper part of the vehicle, I have to keep my arms raised for a long time, often while I’m holding the tools I need to mount the various components,” explained Antonio Maccarinelli, team leader for section 1 of the minibus line at Iveco’s Brescia plant. “Even though they are all light objects, at the end of my shift I always noticed that this apparently minimal effort took its toll on my body. Now, my shoulders are in an excellent condition. Moreover, I must say that the device is really easy to wear. It’s like carrying a backpack, and just needs a few initial settings to be immediately operational. Adjusting the shoulder straps is also quick and easy, which is really important, because I share Mate with other operators.

Each of us has a slightly different build, but we can easily adapt it and feel comfortable.”

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18 NEWS

AW JUNE 2022

Correction

In the New Products section of the April 2022 print issue, the images for Orbex’s ultrasmall gimbal motors and Leuze’s mutlisensor were swapped. The correct information with image for Orbex’s new gimbal motors can be viewed at http://awgo.to/1429 and the correct information and image for Leuze’s new multisensor can be viewed at http://awgo.to/1430.

ABB Showcases Its ASTI Mobile Robotics

By David Greenfield

Editor-in-Chief/Director of Content

F

ollowing ABB’s acquisition of ASTI Mobile Robotics in July 2021, the company showcased ASTI’s autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) as part of its exhibit at Modex 2022 in Atlanta. In its exhibit, ABB focused on the new EBot 350, an AMR designed for use in e-commerce, warehouse logistics, and manufacturing applications.

The EBot 350 features 360 degrees of protection to ensure against collisions with people or objects. ABB says two safety lasers on the Ebot 350 provide “full coverage of the vehicle’s perimeter.” The AMR also uses a safety PLC to further ensure safe operation.

According to ABB, ASTI robotics technolo-

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gies allow users to replace linear production lines with flexible networks, where intelligent AMRs autonomously navigate materials, parts, and finished products between smart connected workstations in factories and logistics centers.

Real-time communications on the EBot 350 enables AMR monitoring for alerts and diagnostics, as well as remote software updates and customizable dashboards. Connectivity can be established using direct machine-to-machine protocol communications as well as Wi-Fi and 4G LTE. The EBot 350’s navigation can be achieved via QR codes or SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping)-Natural navigation. SLAM algorithms allow users to build a map and localize AMRs in that map. ABB says users can manage hundreds of locations with the EBot 350’s multiorigin and multi-destination capabilities with its Smart QR code/RFID reader system.

Sami Atiya, president of ABB’s Robotics & Discrete Automation business, said, “With this acquisition (of ASTI), ABB will be the only company to offer a full automation portfolio of AMRs, robots, and machine automation solutions, from production to logistics to point of consumption.”

See the Ebot 350 in action at Modex 2022.

6/1/22 1:25 PM

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20 NEWS

AW JUNE 2022

Field Device Integration Eases Equipment Installation

By David Miller

Senior Technical Writer

A

s more intelligent sensors, smart instruments, and other connected devices make their way into the field, collecting and synthesizing the large amount of data they produce can become a challenge. Although these devices have the onboard capacity to extract a broad array of data, making it actionable can be complex. And with manufacturers of all sizes using devices and software from various vendors, end users are often forced to navigate an unwieldly patchwork environment wherein some data types are supported by their systems and others are not.

To solve this problem, industry organizations including the FieldComm Group, FDT Group, Profibus and Profinet International, and the OPC Foundation have jointly developed the Field Device Integration (FDI) standard with support from several major technology vendors, such as ABB, Emerson Process Management, Endress+Hauser, Honeywell, Schneider, Siemens, and Yokogawa.

Recently, Emerson reported that its AMS Device Manager, which provides real-time online access to intelligent instruments, became the first

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software of its kind to be fully registered under the new FDI standard.

By using FDI technology, the newest release of AMS Device Manager allows end users to forego the use of Electronic Device Description Language (EDDL) and Field Device Tool/Device Type Manager (FDT/DTM), which are currently the most common technologies for configuring and installing devices. This will simplify the process of setting up new field devices, allowing companies to save time and effort, Emerson said.

The ability to use the FDI standard requires two criteria to be met. First, the host systems or software packages receiving data from field devices must support FDI. Secondly, the field devices themselves must have onboard support for FDI packages.

To meet the first criteria, software and host systems must have: • The EDD Engine, which is a multiprotocol EDDL (electronic device description language) interpreter; • The UI Engine, which provides rendering and hosting services for instrumentation user interfaces; and • A PA-DIM server, which enables access to a standardized set of device information.

The FieldComm Group supplies these compo-

nents along with training workshops to automation suppliers to accelerate the development of FDIcompatible software and host systems.

According to Emerson, AMS Device Manager’s compatibility with the FDI standard is a further step in the company’s ongoing efforts to reduce the time and effort spent installing and configuring the field devices plants rely on to achieve their digital transformation goals.

“FDI integration technology takes the best features of EDDL and FDT/DTM and combines them into a single common standard, making it far easier to select, install, configure, and support new devices,” said Erik Lindhjem, vice president of Emerson’s Reliability Solutions business.

Why FDT 3.0 is a secure data exchange standard for IIoT applications.

6/1/22 1:25 PM

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AW JUNE 2022

Honeywell Expands Its Forge Software Capabilities

By David Greenfield

Editor-in-Chief/Director of Content

T

he trend toward cloud-based industrial software-as-a-service (SaaS) continues with Honeywell’s enhancements of its Honeywell Forge software, including the release of the Honeywell Forge Connected Warehouse.

David Trice, chief product officer at Honeywell Connected Enterprise, says Honeywell started focusing on true SaaS, not containerized legacy solutions, in 2018. He explains Honeywell’s shift toward SaaS as a response to every manufacturing, processing, and warehouse facility being built “as a snowflake” to address specific needs and demands.

The unique requirements of these facilities create complexity for running operations at the executive level and with the operations technology (OT) systems used to run the plant—which are largely still deployed as on-premises implementations.

Honeywell Forge virtualizes OT systems in the cloud to lower the cost of ownership and increase speed of operations [through a focus] on personas and industry use cases. There’s a huge need to solve specific operations issues today, and that’s what we’re focusing on first.”

According to Honeywell, its newly launched Forge Connected Warehouse software “provides organizations with two modules that provide realtime visibility across their warehouse site operations and advanced analytics to reduce unplanned downtime, address recurring challenges, and automate legacy processes. The Site Operations module features a dashboard that indicates how sites are performing against plan and helps managers identify repetitive bottlenecks and proactively address issues that may impact performance. The interface, which is optimized for tablets, enables enterprise benchmarking, monitors areas such as picking and shipping, and makes recommendations to achieve daily targets. Users can use the Honeywell Forge Connect edge solution to connect devices and integrate with standard warehouse systems.”

“We’re attacking the on-premises systems approach,” says Trice, “by building everything on an extensible model. Forge Connect talks to assets to make setpoint adjustments and prepare the data [from those assets] for delivery to the Honeywell Forge cloud.” He stresses the importance of normalizing asset data at the edge before delivery to the cloud as a key aspect of Honeywell’s

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Forge Connect technology.

Asset data is collected by Forge Connect via OPC UA, MQTT, APIs (application programming interfaces), and Modbus connections with plant floor devices, as well as IT interfaces to ERP systems.

In a preview of the Honeywell Forge Connected Warehouse at the Honeywell Connected Enterprise headquarters in Atlanta, Honeywell’s Asset Performance Management (APM) technology was also highlighted. The APM for Warehouse module enables maintenance teams to collaborate on equipment issues that impact performance with remediation recommendations. Operations managers and maintenance managers can use rules-based analytics and asset modeling to identify and analyze trends.

APM’s Operations Manager dashboards can be configured to highlight metrics such as order quote KPIs (key performance indicators), percent of tasks completed, locations of issues in picking and shipping, and what needs to be done to address those issues to achieve specific goals.

The Maintenance Manager dashboard in the APM for Warehouse module showcased in the preview focused on OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) and broke this metric out into its constituent parts—availability, performance, and quality.

The dashboard also highlighted an asset summary status and how these factors can be sorted into a risk matrix by fault severity and asset criticality.

This dashboard can also be configured to aggregate frequent faults and highlight key KPIs. Trice says the Honeywell Force Connected Warehouse software can save 20-30% of an operations manager time simply by not requiring them to collect data for uploading into spreadsheets—a still-common practice in warehouse operations today. “Plus everyone is seeing the same information,” he adds.

Other technology enhancements highlighted

by Honeywell include: • UniSim Design, which now provides a common simulation platform for upstream oil and gas, downstream processing, and sustainability. It contains new features for modeling Green H2, CO2 capture, transportation and storage.

• Honeywell Forge Inspection Rounds offers new features for industrial customers that allow the capture of images and videos during task execution and the creation of reusable checklists to drive standardization across an organization. Other additions include GPSenabled monitoring of worker proximity, enhanced capabilities for gaining insights from historical data trends, and improved asset identification through NFC tagging.

• New Cyber Care services supplement Honeywell’s Process Control Network (PCN) Hardening Service. After completion of the initial PCN hardening services to help industrial companies reduce their OT attack vectors, Cyber Care provides an option to purchase biannual onsite Cyber Care visits by Honeywell consultants for maintaining previously implemented networking hardening benefits and identifying additional PCN hardening settings for enhanced protection.

Read about Honeywell’s cybersecurity research lab.

5/31/22 2:08 PM

22 NEWS

AW JUNE 2022

Synthetic Data and Artificial Intelligence Combine to Improve Machine Vision

By David Miller

Senior Technical Writer

W

ith its ability to help automate quality control, guide flexible pick-andplace systems, and simplify inventory tracking procedures, machine vision is of growing importance to industrial automation technology. For some time now, artificial Intelligence (AI) has played a significant role in helping manufacturers make use of machine vision and these advances show no sign of slowing down in the near term. One example of this continuing advance of AI and machine vision is Siemens Digital Industries Software's SynthAI service, which uses AI and machine learning to train machine vision systems more effectively.

While the images captured by a machine vision system cannot be analyzed without some type software algorithm, most machine vision software uses fixed-rules determined by a human programmer.

In these cases, data is extracted from images in the form of various criteria such as measurement or object type and then compared against pre-

established target values to make a decision. This requires many images of an object to be taken.

The application of synthetic data for machine vision training can dramatically speed up the training process. However, using synthetic data for machine vision applications requires expertise in synthetic image generation, which is complex, labor intensive, and costly. To broaden the use of synthetic data beyond the realm of experts, SynthAI allows 3D CAD (computer-aided design) data to be used for machine vision system training instead. By ingesting the CAD data for a given item, SynthAI can generate thousands of randomized synthetic images and annotate them within minutes without specialized expertise.

SynthAI’s capabilities enable it to train a machine learning model from CAD data that can then be used to detect products in real life.

Once the training is complete, the model can be downloaded, tested, and deployed in machine vision systems offline. Industrial applications for Siemens SynthAI include quality inspections, flexible robotic assembly, robotic picking and sorting and kitting.

“We were looking for a quick and easy solu-

tion that would enable us to detect wire terminals in a robotic electric cabinet assembly station.

With SynthAI our control engineers were able to achieve great results within just a few hours,” said Omer Einav, CEO at Polygon Technologies, a supplier of robotics technologies. “The tedious task of annotating a large set of training images to train the model was shortened significantly. The results show great promise for many additional use cases we plan to handle with SynthAI."

Read more about smart sensors for machine vision.

Time-Sensitive Networking Plugfest Focuses on Interoperability

By David Miller

Senior Technical Writer

T

ime-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a deterministic Ethernet communication method developed as part of the IEC/ IEEE 60802 standard that enables the prioritization of certain data types over others with the goal of enabling the rapid transfer of control system data in applications that cannot tolerate even a small amount of latency, such as high-speed motion control.

Amid all the advances made with TSN over the past several years, interoperability has emerged as a challenge for some TSN implementations.

To address this, Avnu Alliance, an industry forum focused on pushing deterministic capabilities

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NEWS 23

AW OCTOBER 2021

Learn more about TSN.

Read about Belden/Hirschmann’s “TimeSensitive Networking for Dummies.”

2206_News.indd 23

Companies with end devices that use TSN were also present at the plugfest, including Adamson Systems Engineering, L-Acoustics, Meyer Sound, and Keysight. While many participants represented audio-video companies, which is not surprising considering that the TSN standard emerged from this industry, their use of

TSN will have repercussions across other industries where TSN is used.

The Avnu Alliance plans to host more plugfests this year at various locations around the world.

| EK11-20USA |

into open, standards-based networking, recently hosted an international “plugfest” in Boston. The event allowed Avnu members to come together and test their respective platforms and products.

The plugfest gave participants a chance to test new TSN developments, such as the recent revision to 802.1AS, which governs timing and synchronization for TSN applications. According to Avnu Alliance, the results of the event will inform future test plans.

“Plugfests are an invaluable opportunity to validate TSN features on our silicon and how our lowlevel software interoperates with others. [Doing this testing] remote is not a practical option when nanoseconds matter,” says Pekka Varis, senior member technical staff, Texas Instruments.

According to Avnu Alliance, “The unique mix of devices and testing equipment [at the plugfest] enabled insights to be gathered in real world scenarios, such as various implementations of 802.1AS on a single network. The range of perspectives and experience provided for constructive and lively discussions between suppliers and users of TSN components to take place on real world usages and needs.”

Plugfest follows from the formation of the Silicon Validation Task Group by Avnu in March 2020. The group has been working to create alignment on TSN interoperability by developing base test plans, the first of which are now available to members. In October 2021, Avnu also announced its Advanced Certificate Program to provide faster and less expensive testing and certification of endpoint devices.

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5/31/22 2:10 PM

24 NEWS

AW JUNE 2022

Beckhoff Showcases Compact Motion Control for Mobile Applications

By David Greenfield

Editor-in-Chief/Director of Content

T

he rise in direct-to-consumer delivery requires increasingly flexible manufacturing and packaging operations. Supporting this shift are low-voltage compact motion control technologies that can be used in autonomous mobile robots and automated guided vehicles used on the factory floor as well as automated storage and retrieval system in warehouses.

At Modex 2022, Beckhoff displayed several compact motion control technologies suited for such applications. Key aspects of the products highlighted by Beckhoff are their safety features.

Doug Schuchart, global intralogistics industry manager at Beckhoff, noted that the compact motion control products highlighted at the event can meet up to a Category 4 PLe safety.

Schuchart also detailed Beckhoff’s EP7402 EtherCAT Box compact controller. In the demo at Modex 2022, Beckhoff used this controller to control motor-driven rollers from different manufacturers on a conveyor system. He underscored the importance of the real-time

2206_News.indd 24

EtherCAT communications of this controller, noting compliance with NFPA 79, which provides safeguards for industrial machinery to protect operators, equipment, and facilities from fire and electrical hazards.

The EP7402 controller is a two-channel motor output stage for brushless DC motors used in motor-driven rollers. Beckhoff says the controller offers “optimal conveyor control through zeropressure accumulation logic in its firmware, programming in the TwinCAT 3 engineering environment, and high-performance EtherCAT industrial Ethernet communication.”

Designed with conveying tasks in intralogistics, packaging, food and beverage, and assembly in mind, the EP7402 is IP67 rated, does not require a protective enclosure, and features Beckhoff’s One Cable Automation, which allows for one cable to deliver communications and power via two B23 ENP hybrid connectors. The hybrid B23 cables can carry 28A to distribute power to up to 16 motordriven rollers. Built-in motor protection features of the EP7402 include voltage monitoring, thermal overload protection, and overcurrent protection.

Watch this video explaining Beckhoff Automation’s hypervisor technology for virtual machine control applications.

Listen to this podcast with Beckhoff Automation about how OEMs can improve their machines’ material handling capabilities.

5/31/22 2:10 PM

PMMI NEWS 25 AW JUNE 2022

The Amazing Packaging Race at PACK EXPO International

By Sean Riley

Senior Director, Media and Industry Communications, PMMI

E

merson will continue their more than a decade long sponsorship of The Amazing Packaging Race at PACK EXPO International (Oct. 23-26; McCormick Place, Chicago), according to show producer, PMMI, The Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies.

“Education and workforce development is a main priority for PMMI and we are always looking for more ways to engage students to get them excited about our industry,” says Laura Thompson, vice president, trade shows, PMMI. “The Amazing Packaging Race is one of the most popular student programs during the show and we are excited to bring it back to Chicago this year.”

The Amazing Packaging Race brings together students and exhibitors with student teams com-

2206_News.indd 25

pleting tasks assigned by exhibitors throughout all four halls of the show floor. The race will take place on the last day of the show, Oct. 26, and will conclude with the awarding of prizes to the top three teams in the competition at the Emerson Booth (N-4736). Each student on the winning team will receive $1,000. Second and third place team members will receive $500 and $250 each, respectively.

“Emerson’s dedicated support over the years enables us to offer this popular program at our shows year after year and invest in the industry in a big way through the contributions made to the PMMI Foundation,” says Jim Pittas, president and CEO, PMMI. “We are very proud of this partnership and the difference that we are able to make together in the future of this industry.”

Exhibitors who wish to participate in the race can sign up here. The cost to participate is $600 and all proceeds go to the PMMI Foundation. For

more information, contact Kate Fiorianti, senior manager, workforce development, PMMI at 571287-4406 or kfiorianti@pmmi.org.

The PMMI Foundation provides financial support for packaging and processing education throughout the U.S and Canada. Since its inception in 1998, the PMMI Foundation has given more than $2.3 million to strengthen the workforce within the packaging and processing industry.

Registration is also officially open for PACK EXPO International’s return to McCormick Place, Oct. 23-26, 2022, in Chicago. Registration for the show is $30 until Sept. 30, after which it increases to $130. For more information and to register, visit packexpointernational.com.

5/31/22 2:10 PM

26 INTEGRATION INSIGHTS AW JUNE 2022

Though they don’t often receive the attention given to other automation technologies, cables and connectors are critical to the power and data transmission needs of industry’s digital transformation.

By Lauren Gibbons Paul, contributing writer

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5/31/22 2:13 PM

INTEGRATION INSIGHTS 27 AW JUNE 2022

A Single Pair Ethernet shielded copper cable. Source: Panduit

C

onsidering their importance to the industrial world—delivering electrical power, transferring data, and providing reliable connectivity among end points—cables and connectors don’t often receive the attention they’re due. As much attention is spent on Industry 4.0, digital twins, and other advanced automation technologies, it’s important to recognize that cables and connectors are the transactional backbone of digital transformation. Nothing could be done without them—and that includes the wireless activities that depend on wired infrastructures to seamlessly transfer data to gateways for wireless transmission.

This reality is why the selection of cables and connectors should be treated as critically as the more advanced technologies that often capture more of our attention.

Underscoring the importance of cables and connectors to the digital transformation of industry is the health of this market. Allied Market Research projects the compound annual growth of the global cable and connector market will hit 8.3% between 2020 to 2027.

Paying more attention to cabling and connector choices is possibly more important now than ever, as many companies are in the position of needing to upgrade cabling, says Mike Berg, senior business development manager at Panduit.

“Many of the plant floors put in Cat5 cabling

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for Ethernet. But that was a long time ago. The quality of the connection is not up to current standards,” he says. Now, the need to connect controls networks to the enterprise is driving the need for high-performance cabling.

Physical considerations

“When you’ve got 10 or 20 Ethernet-connected devices within a control panel, you need a comprehensive design and blueprint around Ethernet cabling” that accounts for security and safety, says Berg.

Control panel builders are very diligent about complying with safety requirements, but as connections have grown, “they have all struggled a little bit on how to handle this increase in communications cabling going into the control panel. So, there has definitely been a learning curve,” he adds.

End users and panel builders also need to look at long-term reliability and the ability to “future proof” their cable and connector selections to avoid having to upgrade just a year or two later.

Another trend causing ripple effects in cabling and connector decisions is that mechanical packaging is getting smaller. This creates specific issues for OEMs, says Daniel Koch, senior product manager for the signal division of Molex. “This means the area we have to work with is getting smaller.

We can’t just grab things and plug them together as much anymore. The need for smaller compo-

nents is a big driver in our industry,” says Koch.

Most end users need design assistance and advice on materials selection from a trusted partner such as a systems integrator before they buy. “The value of that collaboration is not having that ‘oh, boy’ moment when you realize something doesn’t work,” says Koch. “With prices soaring on copper and other cabling materials, a trusted advisor can also help you keep costs down, especially when it comes to distinguishing between a choice that saves money in the near term but might lead to prematurely having to replace the cable or connector.”

Selection parameters

The number of factors that figure into cable and connector selections are numerous. Here are four key issues to help ensure you select the right cables and connectors for your applications: 1. Examine your component media. Start with the basics, such as: What devices do you need to connect? Berg recommends asking: Which switches will be used? How many devices will be connected? Are IoT (Internet of Things) devices in play? What about cameras? What network protocols, such as EtherNet/IP, Profinet or CC-Link IE are used?

Also, make sure your cabling and connector choices match up with existing terminations.

Other issues to consider include use of cop-

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Environmental classifications and ratings based on mechanical, ingress, climatic/chemical, and electro magnetic (MICE) attributes provide a method of categorizing the environmental classes required for each of the industrial areas and are rated as 1 = low, 2 = medium, and 3 = high. Source: Panduit.

HOW SINGLE-PAIR ETHERNET IMPACTS CABLING OPTIONS A s most Ethernet-connected devices on plant floors incorporate Ethernet managed switches and use multi-layer segmented networks, Ethernet programmable controllers and smart I/O distribution devices are now common elements of control systems. But when you look at the edge of the network, “the majority of connections are to non-processor devices, such as analog devices, simple I/O, and sensors,” Berg says. “The Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) format has been designed for both IT and OT standards to provide communication, power, and extended distance cable runs for these type devices.”

Classic Ethernet works with a four-pair Cat 5 cable within a frequency range of up 100 MHz. The individual pairs send/receive interchangeably, and up to 1 Gbit can be transmitted. “In the case of SPE, only one pair is available.

To transmit 1 Gbit, chip sets with a range of up to 600 MHz are used. Some frequencies in the wide spectrum receive, while other frequencies send,” says Horst Messner, product manager at Helukabel. “This is how SPE works.”

SPE enables consistent data transmission up to the field

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level, meaning that only one pair is required to transmit the signals instead of the previous two or four pairs. Messner says, in this way, SPE matches the industrial requirement profile exactly, and offers the following advantages (compared to the classical industrial Ethernet): • Thinner cables; • Lower cost of assembly; • Less space requirements, lower weight; • Smaller bending radii and smaller drag chains in the case of continuously moving applications; • Lower caloric load, less smoke development; and • Less materials like copper or plastic protects resources.

SPE is already being used in the process industries because it allows them to bring Ethernet to intrinsically safe areas and simplify the network and power design, says Mike Vermeer, engineering strategy manager, at Panduit. One significant advantage to SPE seen by process industry users is “the ability for a single device to simultaneously support multiple protocols over SPE, for example OPCUA, Profinet, and Foundation Fieldbus,” he says.

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per and two-pair or four-pair Ethernet cabling (see sidebar on Single Pair Ethernet).

2. Location. When you're shopping for cables, think about the spaces they’re going in. Are you routing from an office environment?

Are you going through any riser spaces between floors? You don't want to put cabling in and then find out later you ran through a plenum or a riser space requiring it to be ripped out. Fire safety factors are also key here. If the cabling and connectors will be in an IT cabinet, it is sufficient to use the commercial-grade Ethernet cable that is commonly available. But as you start to get closer and closer to the machine level, you’ll need to consider things like the location of the power source, what separations you might need, and whether you’ll use a cable tray. Berg suggests ensuring you select cabling with the proper jacketing or insulation to fit the application. Then look at the grounding and bonding requirements for the network system.

3. Termination performance level. This factor is key to noise susceptibility, says Berg.

People tend to overlook the fact that a lot of the copper Ethernet cabling on industrial plant floors is susceptible to electromagnetic interference noise (EMI). The latest cabling—Cat6, Cat6A and Cat8, for example—is much less susceptible to EMI. Going with the most up-to-date version will protect your investment. “That gives you the best possible lifespan on that cabling install,” says Berg.

4. Harsh conditions. Be sure to consider factors such as shock and vibration, resistance to dust, temperature thresholds, washdown areas, exposure to acids or oil mixtures, and electromagnetic noise. A commonly recommended approach to cable and connector selection is called a MICE analysis, which addresses the mechanical, ingress, climate/ chemical and EMI factors that can impact cabling and connector choices.

We rate our cabling for use in different MICE

environments, explains Berg. The MICE analysis helps users determine if a different cable or connector can better survive in their operating environment. It can also be helpful in evaluating the effects on maintenance scheduling.

Harsh conditions can also dictate specific requirements for cables and connectors. For example, an RJ45 connection is susceptible to vibration, but an M12 connector prevents vibration from affecting that Ethernet connection. Likewise, when connecting a high-flex device such as a robotic arm, you will need a high-flex cable. The most rugged cable type is rated as being able to handle more than 10 million cycles. “If you have some type of a moving device on a manufacturing floor that is making a new widget every 10 seconds, you can easily exceed 15,000 cycles very quickly. So, going with a cable that has a rating over 10 million cycles makes a lot of sense in that application,” says Berg.

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Panduit’s SPE Shielded Copper Cable has 18/7 AWG stranded tinned copper conductors with foamed polyethylene insulation. The conductors are twisted in a pair and include two fillers. The pair is surrounded by an aluminum/ polyester foil shield, a tinned copper braid shield, and includes a 24/7 AWG stranded tinned copper ground wire. Source: Panduit

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OEE as a Tool for Continuous Improvement

Four real-world application stories show why OEE remains a bedrock manufacturing metric for real-time data collection to enhance companies’ ability to take corrective actions continuously.

By Beth Stackpole, contributing writer

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Fueled

by the proliferation of industrial data and push for data-driven business practices, OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) remains a core manufacturing metric given its ability to boil complex production problems down to relatively simple terms and drive continuous improvement.

OEE, which can be used to evaluate a single machine, an entire line, or a complete factory, is a relatively simple equation based on three factors: Equipment availability—specifically run-time divided by planned production time for that specific asset, performance—the ideal cycle time multiplied by total product/part count divided by run time, and quality—established by the good count divided by total count. The goal of OEE is to improve efficiency, reduce downtime and operating expenses, and minimize waste.

Calculating OEE as an ongoing best practice gives manufacturers a reality check on production planning and business expectations based on what equipment is actually doing as opposed to presumptions about what it’s supposed to be doing. As a result, OEE remains a top-three metric for manufacturers, according to LNS Research’s 2020 Analytics That Matter survey conducted in partnership with MESA International. More than half (54%) of analytics leaders said they are tracking OEE, which puts it behind only net profit margin tracking (63%) and on-time delivery tracking (68%), the survey found.

“OEE is an easy metric to start with as it doesn’t require downtime, it’s not mission critical, and it isn’t going to break your line,” says Chris McLaughlin, director of sales and marketing for Vertech, a systems integrator specializing in industrial automation. “It’s also easy to prove ROI

(return on investment) as it creates a baseline for continuous improvement, highlighting how much production has improved and how much efficiency you’ve gained.”

Measuring OEE was once a manual exercise, but more recently OEE functionality has found its way into MES software as well as control systems, SCADA platforms, and edge computing devices.

Advances in plant floor connectivity and increased availability of real-time data through Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platforms is putting a fresh face on OEE by expanding access to real-time and enterprise system data that can deliver additional context and insights to improve OEE scores.

“Companies are trying to take it further upstream and downstream and integrate with other systems to take more into account,” says McLaughlin. “The more information you can get from ERP and other systems, the more you improve an abil-

OEE is used to monitor performance on a tissue converting line at Cascades Tissue Group. Source: Cascades Holdings US Inc.

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Vertech helps customers like Hunter Industries create OEE metrics to monitor line performance. Source: Vertech ity to do continuous improvement because you understand what is really behind why something is unavailable or performing poorly.”

Production trend assessments

Hunter Industries depends on a varied automation landscape to produce its irrigation and outdoor lighting equipment. With regular OEE monitoring of machines, starting with spreadsheets before moving to the Inductive Automation Ignition software platform in 2013, Hunter Industries can stay on top of machine performance and keep production goals on track.

“There are a variety of reasons a machine isn’t producing the amount we need it to,” says Scott Corbett, Hunter Industries senior manager of operations technology and training. “OEE is the best method to figure that out and maximize machine output.”

Hunter Industries mostly conducts OEE at a machine or line level to advance both long-term and real-time performance goals. The company fuels its OEE calculations with real-time data from PLCs using a mix of automated and manual methods. The results are regularly served up

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to employees via visual dashboards on the plant floor, enabling them to monitor issues and make essential adjustments.

“You don’t know if a machine running tooling is a half a second slower than it’s supposed to be running without a real-time monitoring system,” Corbett explains. “Real-time OEE performance is extremely beneficial in a high-volume molding operation to produce the right amount of parts.”

OEE also delivers valuable trending data for Hunter Industries to evaluate subtle losses and gains over time while providing measurable performance targets that can be harnessed to drive progress. “It helps to have something that can compile data for short or long periods of time so engineers can stay on top of putting out fires as well as making long-term progress on process improvement projects,” Corbett says.

Informing operations and executives

With 30 plants all using standardized industrial assets, Saint Gobain Sekurit is a strong proponent of OEE as a way to measure and compare perfor-

mance across its global factory footprint as well as for capacity planning.

As part of its core KPI (key performance indicator) portfolio for the last 15 years, OEE is reported per shift and once daily drawing from Saint Gobain Sekurit’s MES system along with some manual data entry. Sebastien Thuillier, Saint Gobain Sekurit’s digital transformation manager, says the company recently advanced its OEE reporting using Litmus’ edge data platform to automate data collection and allow anyone from any location to check in on the performance of key manufacturing lines. In fact, OEE metrics are not only used by plant floor personnel at Saint Gobain Sekurit; it also informs managers in logistics, supply chain, and maintenance operations to help them focus on continuous improvement, whether that involves adjustments to spare parts inventory or addressing reliability issues.

Automating OEE ensures data is collected in a standard way across equipment and made available to any system, which takes the burden off plant floor operators and reduces the potential for miscommunication.

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Of course, the ability to apply live monitoring to production operations doesn’t necessarily advance OEE reporting, but it does mean Saint Gobain Sekurit personnel are alerted to problems quicker, enabling them to respond faster and even anticipate issues in some cases. In the end, corrective action translates into a better OEE score.

“The system enables us to more quickly react to decrease downtime and address issues if a line stopped because there are no more raw materials or it’s missing an operator,” Thuillier explains.

Avoiding the blame game

For Glidewell Dental, producing tens of thousands of patient-specific restorative dental devices cost effectively requires major automation and effective communication.

As part of an end-to-end automation initiative to enable cloud-connected manufacturing, put in motion through a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the University of California, Berkeley, Glidewell has made OEE a best practice to ensure high-quality production with the support of Beckhoff Automation’s industrial PCs and TwinCAT3 automation platform. Glidewell calculates OEE every 15 minutes at the machine level to extrapolate the data for the entire production line.

The micro-level OEE calculation helps evaluate how many parts are rejected against whether a machine is down because it produced too many parts or it’s running at too high a calibration. Calculating

OEE at this level is particularly important to ensure the automated production workflow runs smoothly on two lines pumping out 2,000 units daily without sacrificing quality of output.

“Our process is highly statistical and the parts we mill are very fragile,” says Kunal Patil, manager of automation engineering for Glidewell. “Any bit of wear on the tools can generate inconsistencies on the part and any tiny bit of calibration change alters the performance of the machines.”

Prior to calculating OEE, there would be a lot of finger pointing and blame games in the event of a problem or if target numbers were missed because there was no benchmark to measure against and no insight into why a specific machine was down.

“Now that we have OEE, we know exactly which machine or part is not producing,” Patil says. “It’s a high-level metric that tells people whether they’re losing their time or opportunity because of unavailability, performance, or quality.”

OEE’s simple terms also make it clear which group is responsible for addressing an issue. “If we lost an opportunity because of performance, that’s something the engineering group has to work on, if it’s due to availability, that’s a different group,” he explains. “It provides a common language where everyone understands what to fix.”

Plant performance comparisons

At Cascades Canada, an organization with more than 70 paper and pulp plants, OEE has been a long-standing metric that everyone in the company takes seriously.

OEE calculations are regularly performed at the individual machine and line level, but the metric is also used at the plant level to drive continuous improvement and keep its multiple sites striving toward the same business goals. To ensure the application of this focus, Cascades Canada has cultivated a culture of OEE by establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) and indoctrinating employees at every level in the importance of a strong OEE score and how the metric and relevant data can in-

The basic OEE calculation is performed by calculating three factors: availability, performance, and quality. Source: OEE.com

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OEE Tools and Guidance More information about OEE guidelines and benefits can be accessed via PMMI’s OpX Leadership Network at www.opxleadershipnetwork.org. form action to drive continuous improvement.

“All the KPIs are made available through the Microsoft Power BI platform to be accessible for everyone from the president of the company to the mill manager,” says Claude Bedard, project director/CoE Maintenance and Reliability. “If you have two consecutive days of bad OEE, you fully expect to get a call from the boss asking about what’s happening and what the action plan is to fix it.”

Cascades manages OEE through mostly manual processes with individual operators using a homegrown system to capture data from a variety of legacy platforms and SAP ERP to calculate scores.

More recently, its OEE efforts are being burnished by a project to holistically improve asset health across its 70 plants using Emerson condition monitoring technologies. While the detailed asset health data doesn’t directly change OEE calculations, it does provide a guide to target improvements.

“With its asset health information, Cascades can drill down and figure out what needs to be improved in order to have better OEE results,” says Alain Pellegrino, vice president of industrial reliability solutions for Laurentide Controls, an Emerson Impact Partner working as a system integrator on Cascades Canada’s asset health project.

Moving forward, standardization of terms and coding across the disparate mill sites will be a priority to squeeze more value out of OEE and use it as a tool to compare factory performance.

“We have to make sure when we’re comparing one paper mill with another and one has an OEE of 85 and the other an OEE of 84, that the 1% difference is real, not just because they’re doing OEE differently,” Bedard says. “We are working on governance—standard codes and ways of doing assessments to make sure data is compiled in the same way.”

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Sensors Help Increase Batch Capacity Non-contact infrared sensors enabled global plastics and rubber processor Ilpea Industries Inc. to increase yields and reduce cycle times.

By Jeanne Schweder, contributing writer

T

emperature is one of the most critical factors in managing plastics processing. In response, an entire industry has grown up around creating sensors and other devices to monitor and measure process temperatures. Yet even sophisticated thermal technologies some-

The Raytek Marathon MM infrared temperature sensor from Fluke Process Instruments. times need an upgrade, particularly when companies are trying the improve the productivity and quality of their processes.

That was the case for Ilpea Industries, founded in 1960 and long considered a global leader in the design and manufacture of plastic, magnetic, and

rubber components. The company is headquartered in the town of Malgesso, in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, not far from Milan, the center of Italian industrial activity. Ilpea operates manufacturing facilities around the world near its customers’ facilities.

Examples of extruded under-windshield products produced by Ilpea Industries for the automotive industry.

Source: Ilpea Industries

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Ilpea wanted to reduce batch cycle time and improve yields on a mixing process for plastic extrusions used to make gaskets, tubing, and other custom products. Prior to the extrusion process, polymers must be mixed in a hopper and heated to achieve specific material properties.

While thermocouples are frequently employed to measure temperature during this operation, the heated plastic tends to accumulate on the end of the device, where it acts as an insulator. This affects measurement accuracy and delays determination of the process temperature setpoint. In addition, thermocouples can easily break due to the thick, viscous nature of the heated plastic material.

To address these issues, Ilpea Industries turned to Fluke Process Instruments, which installed a Raytek Marathon MM sensor on each blender at the plant. Unlike thermocouples, this non-contact sensor is unaffected by product build-up and consequently provides a faster reading of temperature setpoint. The resulting improvement in measurement accuracy has helped the company optimize the performance of the extrusion process.

Rod Hackney, electrical engineering supervisor at Ilpea, says the faster, more accurate indication of the temperature setpoint enabled the company to save approximately 15 minutes of production time on every batch.

This increased capacity for each blender by one batch per day. With six blenders in operation, each installed with the Raytek non-contact sensor, this means an extra six batches can be produced every day at the Ilpea plant.

The Raytek Marathon MM sensor has a wide process temperature measurement range (from 204-260oC/400-500oF) and can be used in both batch and continuous process applications. It features integrated through-the-lens video or laser sighting, along with fast and accurate focusing and a user-friendly interface.

Formed in 2015 after Fluke’s acquisitions of Raytek, Ircon and Datapaq, Fluke Process Instruments specializes in making products that measure temperatures in a variety of industrial applications. These products include noncontact infrared temperature measurement instruments and industrial process monitoring equipment such as thermal imagers, infrared line-scanners, and fixed infrared sensors; measurement and calibration tools, including thermal imaging cameras and software; and systems for analyzing and reporting on the effectiveness of industrial heating processes.

“In developing products for the plastics industry, the goal of Fluke Process Instruments is to improve the productivity and efficiency of plastics processing by providing more accurate temperature data,” says Dr. Martin Budweg, senior product manager. “Our products also help the industry quickly detect potential problems to avoid scrap, waste, and energy loss, as well as control the temperature of fast-moving parts.”

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36 NEW PRODUCTS AW JUNE 2022

High Payload Industrial Robot

Comau, comau.com The N-220 from Comau is a 220kg payload robot featuring a modular set up, direct kinematics, absolute calibration, and enhanced algorithms. According to the company, these characteristics deliver significant ease of use, straightforward integration, and faster post-installation maintenance while ensuring precision, flexibility, repeatability, and minimum backlash.

Manufactured via a fully automated production line in Comau’s Turin Innovation Center of Advanced Robotics in Italy, the robot features an innovative architectural approach based on progressive modularity, component reduction, advanced motors, and APC drivers. With its wide working area and Performance Level D cartesian safety features, the N-220 robot is well-suited for a range of industries including automotive, food and beverage, fulfillment, and logistics.

Field-Wireable M12 Connectors

Binder USA, binder-usa.com Binder USA now offers its field-wireable M12 connectors (series 713, 715, and 825) with cage clamp quick connections. Cage clamp technology is an alternative to screw termination, offering simpler installation that reduces the exposure of cable assemblies. Cage clamp termination is recommended for applications that are subject to mechanical loads, including machines exposed to vibrations caused by motors or manufacturing processes. While the standard screw termination is cost effective and user friendly, it is also relatively time consuming. For example, installers must loosen each respective screw, insert the wire, and retighten the screw for each contact pin individually in order to clamp the wire. With the cage calmp, installers insert the opening tool into the hole provided to release the spring, guide the wire into the contact hole, and remove the opening tool, causing the spring to clamp the wire.

The constant spring force permanently acting on the wire establishes contact, ensuring a vibration-proof connection that withstands shock loads. Most connector components, such as the sleeve or pressure screw, are identical to products with screw termination, making them interchangeable.

High Payload Mobile Robots

Locus Robotics, locusrobotics.com An expanded line of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) from Locus Robotics includes the Locus Vector and Locus Max. These new robots join the Locus Origin robot to create a family of AMRs for a range of warehouse and manufacturing uses. The new line addresses applications from ecommerce, case-picking, and pallet-picking to scenarios requiring larger, heavier payloads to support the full range of product movement needs in fulfillment and distribution warehouses, the company says.

The Locus Vector is an industrial-strength AMR features omnidirectional mobility, compact design, and robust payload capacity for use in any environment. Locus Vector will ship to customers starting this summer. The Locus Max has a heavyweight payload capacity and flexibility to transport a variety of heavy materials, cartons, or pallets across a facility. Currently deployed at several sites, Locus Max will have limited availability in 2022 and expanded availability in 2023.

Paper Cushioning Conveyance System

Pregis, pregis.com The EasyPack Packmaster conveyance system allows items to be conveyed via air blowers and aluminum air ducts to overhead delivery hoppers. According to the company, the new delivery system significantly improves worker ergonomics and packing speed, as well as reducing equipment capital expenditures. Proprietary engineering has gone into the design of the air duct conveyance system to enable efficient operation. Unlike other delivery systems which use conveyor belts and/or structural poles, the Pregis conveyor-less approach is more cost effective, uses less energy, frees up floor space, and is low maintenance. The air ducts move fan-folded paper created from a roll with nearly 5 km (3.1 miles) of paper (depending on paper weight).

This significantly reduces roll changes per shift, adding significantly to efficiency.

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Thermal Interface Material

Henkel, henkel.com Henkel has announced the commercialization of its latest gel thermal interface material, Bergquist Liqui Form TLF 10000. The one-part, high thermal conductivity dispensable gel is designed to provide robust heat transfer for high-power electronic components, improving operational efficiency and extending lifetime system reliability. Larger, higher-power devices such as ASICs and FPGAs are the norm in industrial automation electronics. As component density and complexity increase in response to faster data processing and digitalization requirements, higher wattage thermal output must be controlled to deliver dependable performance. Bergquist Liqui Form TLF 10000 provides 10.0 W/m-K thermal conductivity and is well-suited for applications where environments can be extreme or unpredictable, making reliability a critical factor.

Wireless Switchgear

Steute, steute.com Wireless switches and sensors from Steute guarantee safe, reliable, and cable-free signal transmission in a range of applications. According to Steute, one potential area for these devices is plastic injection molding, especially multi-component processes which often involve machines with rotary plates. These plates enable the main part of the construction element to be molded first and then—after rotating the plate by 90 or 180°—injection of the second part. This prevents distortion and accelerates the production process. However, one challenge here is monitoring the slide positions and the correct closing of the injection molding tool. If the slides are not in the correct position and the tool closes, this can lead to costly repairs. To prevent this and eliminate the effort of installing cables, which are then also susceptible to wear and tear, users can opt for a wireless position switch or wireless inductive sensor from Steute.

Safety Switches

Norstat, norstat.com The NS Series safety switch is designed for use on machines where hazard conditions remain even after the machine has been powered down. The NS Series features RFID technology to detect the actuator which has a maximum holding force of 2100 N. This system provides a different code to each actuator making it virtually tamper proof. The design uses a through hole for the actuator and includes plug-in protection caps for the fixing screws, thereby eliminating the possibility of any dust or dirt build up in the switch. The head of the switch can also be moved in 90° increments, allowing for multiple set up combinations. Housing on the switch is a glass fiber reinforced technopolymer that is shock proof and self-extinguishing.

NS Series switches are available in a variety of configurations, have a mechanical endurance of one million operating cycles, and carry a protection rating of IP 67/IP 69K.

AC-DC Power Modules

TDK Corporation, tdk.com TDK Corporation has announced the introduction of 12V and 48V output models to the conduction cooled TDK-Lambda brand PFH500F series of AC-DC power modules. The power supplies are rated at 504W and feature a compact 4-in. x 2.4-in. footprint with programming and communication through a PMBus interface. The PFH500F series utilizes GaN semiconductors, bridgeless power factor correction, synchronous rectification and digital control, enabling efficiencies of up to 92%.

Opto-couplers have been replaced by digital isolators for long term reliability and stability. Accepting an 85 to 265V AC input, the modules deliver 12V at 42A or 48V at 10.5A and can be adjusted from 9.6 to 14.4V or 38.4 to 52.8V using the trim pin or PMBus interface. The droop mode current share option enables modules to be connected in parallel for additional power. Baseplate cooling allows operation at temperatures ranging from -40 to +100°C. The metal enclosure measures 4 x 2.4 x 0.53-in. (101.6 x 61.0 x 13.3mm) and is encapsulated for MIL-STD-810G shock and vibration.

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BNC Connectors

Belden, belden.com BNC Connectors from Belden are designed to maximize broadcast signal integrity, quality, performance and durability, the company says. Rated for 6 GHz and 12 GHz applications, one-piece and three-piece connector types are available. The connectors exceed SMPTE return loss standards, providing high headroom and 75 Ohm performance. Long-term durability is ensured through brass construction and patented compression rings with pullout forces that exceed 100 lbs. Other features include: A 360-degree, floating-pin basket at the back of the connector; internal 360-degree compression rings to eliminate ingress and egress from the back of the connector; and a 51% smaller footprint than standard BNCs.

Mounting System

Rockwell Automation, rockwellautomation.com The CrossBoard platform provides flexibility in motor control and protection devices. The out-of-the-box system is provided as one complete base unit, a bus structure with IP20 touch-safe plastic housing, which can be directly assembled and fitted with components after unpacking. Components snap onto the CrossBoard without tools, meaning the connection is automatic.

Components can be removed and snapped back on to another section of the CrossBoard. For safety reasons, the lock mechanism must be released with a screwdriver. This prevents accidental removal of any components. According to Rockwell Automation, the fast exchange of modules allows the timesaving and economical adaptation of the system to extensions and update.

Linear Motor Modules

Faulhaber, faulhaber.com The LM2070 linear motors are available with stroke lengths from 40 to 220mm. Despite the compact stator dimensions of 20 x 20 x 70mm (WxHxL), the small linear DC servomotor has high mechanical performance indicators. The continuous force is 9.2 N, and up to 28 N of peak force is available. The plain bearing of the forcer rod can handle speeds of up to 3 m/s. At the same time, it can maintain precise control; with the integrated Hall sensors, the absolute positioning accuracy is +/- 0.1 mm and the repeatability is +/- 50 μm. With an optional external sensor, these figures can be improved to +/- 0.01 mm and a repeatability of +/- 1 μm. On top of this comes practically maintenance-free operation as the motor has no moving parts. Moreover, the linear drive operates nearly noise-free.

Infrared Temperature Sensors

Optis, optis.com Optis has released a new line of infrared pyrometers. These pyrometers use non-contact sensing to determine the surface temperature of an object based on its emitted infrared radiation. They can read the temperature of inaccessible or moving objects without difficulty. The Optris CS LT series infrared pyrometers are ideally suited for temperature measurement in small and narrow environments. They feature rugged stainless steel construction, a broad measuring range (-50°C to 1030°C [-58°F to 1886°F]), and a rating for use in ambient temperatures up to 80°C (176°F) without the need for additional cooling. Optris CSmicro series miniature infrared pyrometers can be used in ambient temperatures up to 120°C (248°F); their small size allows them to be installed in tight spaces.

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NEW PRODUCTS 39 AW JUNE 2022

Compact Solenoid Valve

Burkert Fluid Control Systems, burkert.com The 2/2-way Type 7011 with an orifice diameter up to 2.4 mm, and 3/2way Type 7012 with an orifice diameter up to 1.6 mm are both available in normally open and normally closed configurations. The new valves achieve a compact design thanks to AC08 coil technology that optimises the ratio between the iron circuit and the solenoid coil winding. As a result, the standard version valve featuring a 24.5mm solenoid coil with encapsulation is among the smallest explosion-proof variations available, enabling the design of more compact control cabinets. In addition, the Type 7011 solenoid design is also one of the smallest gas valves on the market. Within fuel gas applications, the valves can be used to regulate industrial burners, such as ignition gas valves, as well as moveable and stationary automatic heaters for both industrial and commercial use. The valves can be fitted to flanges or manifolds, and push-in fittings can be selected for a flexible hose connection.

Robot Development Kit

Flexiv, flexiv.com The Robotic Development Kit (RDK) from Flexiv aims to provide users with a toolkit that can allow them to enhance how their robots work, the company says. The RDK utilizes customizable APIs so users can completely control an adaptive robot and make instant program modifications or integrate external hardware and software. Featuring the ability to issue multiple commands, execute high-level tasks, and invoke various skills, developers can rapidly create custom apps like teleoperation, dual-arm tasks, or autonomous mobile work.

According to Flexiv, with the development kit’s technical documentation and on-demand assistance from Flexiv’s team of experts, beginners can delve into programming and learn on the fly to transform their skillset.

Discrete Valve Controller

Emerson, emerson.com The TopWorxTM DX PST with Hart 7 from Emerson provides valve data and diagnostic information, enabling the digital transformation of process applications. The new DX PST integrates with existing valves and control systems, giving operators access to critical valve data, trends, and diagnostics that can be used to predict and schedule maintenance. The DX PST’s partial stroke test ensures the system’s reliable function without shutting down the process. A safety feature that confirms the valve will fully close and stop the process if an emergency is detected, and the test is activated by simply pressing the local PST button. No additional equipment is required. To prevent critical failure in upset conditions, the unit will override testing to perform an emergency shutdown.

Hazardous and Washdown Bench Scales

Hardy Process Solutions, hardysolutions.com The HIBSX series of stainless steel bench scales are designed to be low-profile and easy to clean. To ensure durability in industrial applications, Hardy has performed corner, overload and cycle testing to more than eight million cycles.

The HISBX series is ideal for manual check weighing, piece portioning, counting, and adding minor ingredients to a process or a batch. With an optimized internal ‘X’ design, the scales reduce the time required to sanitize them while offering one of the lowest profiles in the industry at 2.02 to 2.95 inches (51.3 to 75 mm adjustable). Hardy HIBSX Bench Scales come with RoHS compliant 304 stainless steel hardware, frames, and platters. Users may choose between stainless steel hermetically sealed IP68/69K, C2 load cells or aluminum, environmentally sealed IP67 C2 load cells, depending on their application.

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40 INDUSTRY VIEW AW JUNE 2022

iemen igita nd trie o are Focuses on Digital Transformation

By Dick Slansky Senior Analyst, ARC Advisory Group

Lockheed-Martin i e iemen Xcelerator open integrated cloud services as the p at orm or a ne air ra de e opment programs going or ard. i i a o them to integrate their design/build/ operate/maintain development i e e and emp o a model-based tem engineering for process impro ement.

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S

iemens Digital Industries Software (SDIS) held its analyst/media event at the GM Renaissance in Detroit in April—the first face-to-face analyst/media event for the company since 2019.

Cedrik Neike, CEO of Siemens Digital Industries and managing board member of Siemens AG, focused on what actual problems Siemens is solving for its customers by combining the real and digital worlds through not only a digital transformation, but through building and implementing digital twins that enable their customers to design, manufacture, and service their products using a digital twin to continuously optimize the product and the production process. Neike presented several actual customer stories from industries like biotech and pharma to food and beverage to battery manufacturing. He pointed out that the most successful companies today are an integrated combination of hardware and software, an efficient blend of IT and OT. He noted that companies that started out as pure software companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. are now highly invested in hardware, manufacturing, and operation. And that, he said, is where Siemens is today, from automation hardware and sensors to the edge and the cloud.

Neike also pointed out that an average Industry 4.0 factory generates two thousand terabytes of data per month, and most of that data is unused. Siemens’ vision and strategy is to use the entire digital thread across the design/manufacture/service lifecycle to build connected digital twins that begin to use this data to truly integrate IT and OT and beyond to the entire supply chain of industries. He maintains that Siemens is well on the way to making the transition from being an automation company and manufacturer to becoming a tech company.

Tony Hemmelgarn, CEO of Siemens Software, pointed out that the very nature of work has changed, and companies are changing their business models to reflect this. Companies want technology and solu-

tions that enable them to become more agile, flexible, capable of reaching new markets, and equipped with a field work force with tools that make them smarter and more adaptable. One thing that Siemens offers their customers is tools and technology to implement comprehensive executable digital twins. He pointed out that IT/OT convergence is being re-imagined and accomplished through the implantation of digital twins used to optimize production processes.

He also noted that their customer Lockheed-Martin will use Siemens Xcelerator open integrated cloud services as the platform for all new aircraft development programs going forward. This will allow them to fully integrate their design/build/operate/maintain development lifecycle and employ a model-based systems engineering for process improvement.

More than 97% of the Xcelerator portfolio is available in the cloud and is offered as a service through subscription, as well as on-premises to meet customer requirements. The digital thread connectivity of Xcelerator is enabling “shift-left engineering” where design engineers can apply downstream data, which includes Internet of Things and artificial intelligence data in the lifecycle to gain insight into a faster and more optimized design process. This is enabling companies to shift from being product companies to service companies.

Xcelerator enables companies to remotely connect their design organizations and operate in real-time across the design/test/ validate product development lifecycle.

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INTEGRATOR VIEW 41 AW JUNE 2022

Palletizer Upgrade?

It’s Likely Overdue

By Bryan Little Project Manager/ Principal Engineer, Avanceon

Replacing an entire palletizing system is a large undertaking from a logistics, nan ia and time sink standpoint.

However, like other equipment, it can be treated as a targeted riskbased obsolescence upgrade that considers the relevant mechanical and electrical issues.

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D

o you know that old dusty thing tucked away in your plant’s warehouse that no one ever thinks about but is likely one of the most critical assets you own? It’s the dreaded palletizing system. Because most don’t understand its unique complexity, as it often has an aura of “don’t disturb the sleeping giant.” As a result of this stigma, palletizing machines are frequently poorly maintained, seldom upgraded, and often are not afforded a good preventative maintenance program. Moreover, it receives this neglect despite being one of the hardest running pieces of equipment in your plant; the palletizing machine handles all of your production 24/7/365 no matter what you throw at it.

When things go wrong with the palletizer there are two possible solutions: shut down production or hand stack. While shutting down production is a doomsday scenario, hand stacking is still a significant challenge because of the lack of people available to dedicate to the task, as well as other difficulties. For instance, imagine what would happen if a palletizer broke down and the repair required a number of obsolete parts that you can’t find, support, or replace. Replacing an entire palletizing system is a large undertaking from a logistics, financial and time sink standpoint. However, like other equipment, it can be treated as a targeted riskbased obsolescence upgrade that considers the relevant mechanical and electrical issues. As an example of this risk-based approach, Avanceon recently upgraded a 25-year-old Linuxbased palletizing system with numerous obsolete servo motors for positioning. The system included one main full pallet trunk, three individual robotic stacking cells, 18 infeed lanes for various product paths, and more than 50 different pallet stacking patterns. On the positive side, the palletizer system had a solid mechanical frame and rails and, as a result, we worked with the customer to define an approach to the upgrade that addressed the substantial electrical issues and closed the gap on some well needed minor mechanical upgrades. From that 1990s era technology, we took the old, unsupportable system, and morphed it into a system that an average, modern maintenance technician could support and modify. The renovated system included a solid foundation of Rockwell CLX, new Rockwell servos, and an Aveva HMI

(human machine interface) and historian platform for visualization and connection to the production and warehouse management systems. The technology selections aligned with the customers standards both from a model and software methodology perspective as well as integrating with the Aveva SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) software. The system as a whole provided complete visibility into the palletizing and case management operation, upgraded and compliant safety measures, and the ability to expand the system.

A key take away from the project was that, while the initial assessment predicted that the mechanical systems were stable, we uncovered that was not the case after undertaking the upgrade. While the equipment could deliver based on the old configurations and “delicate balance” tuned over 20 years of operations and concessions, it could not handle the variability and pace of the new electrical components.

In this case it wasn’t just the controller that needed an upgrade—many of the critical sensors, and roller start-stop mechanics needed to be upgraded as well. A parallel to this would be putting a brand new engine into a car with old shocks, brakes, and tires. Without those ancillary mechanical upgrades, it will still perform like the original car.

With a new engine, key mechanical upgrades and a new dashboard on the system, the operators and plant leadership can rely upon the palletizer to continue to be the lifeblood of the plant, ensuring production and pallets will flow for the next 20 years. So, don’t forget about that dirty old clanking thing in the warehouse.

It is an important part of your production system, and it likely deserves attention and an automation upgrade.

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42 FINANCE VIEW AW JUNE 2022

Creating the Monetary Information to ea re ipment ien mpro ement

By Larry White

CMA, CFM, CPA, CGFM lwhite@rcaininstitute.org

Executive Director, Resource Consumption Accounting Institute

M

anufacturers are increasingly challenged to justify efficiency improvement investments using financial outcomes. This can be extremely difficult when using traditional costing oriented toward financial reporting requirements which does not go to the depth of many operational metrics. This column presents a simple example of the type of information needed to address the common deficiencies in typical financial accounting information. The illustrated Resource Consumption Accounting model creates a dashboard where pro-

duction can toggle a plus or minus sign to see the monetary impact of a change in efficiency.

The model is built on detailed information from the work centers engaged in production, both direct and support services. Each work center has a planned cost based on a planned output quantity, such as the number of machine or labor hours. Actual costs and output quantities are collected, and the target column shows the plan adjusted for changes in volume/output. The relevant metric to gauge monetary performance is actual vs. target.

Each work center can be broken down into resource pools using the same approach. In this example, the resource pools of the forming work center are shown.

The model shows that the extruder resource pool is underperforming, i.e., the actual cost is much higher than target for the actual output achieved. Detailed in the table are the individual resources that make up the extruder resource pool. Primary costs are resources in the extruder resource pool, and secondary costs reflect support services consumed by the extruder resource pool. This table also provides insight into fixed costs and proportional costs, which vary with resource pool output.

Costs in the fixed-proportional columns are proportional at their source but fixed to the extruder—in this case: hours spent doing preventative maintenance.

The granularity of this type of monetary information, which reflects the quantitative causal operational behavior of resources and their outputs, allows for improvements in efficiency of manufacturing resources to be readily quantified without the distortions created by pooled overhead using gross estimates of fixed and variable costs or ignoring capacity utilization costs, particularly idle/excess capacity. Resource consumption accounting and other advanced costing approaches that embrace the Institute of Management Accountants Conceptual Framework for Managerial Costing focus on reflecting causal operational information in their monetary information.

This illustration was implemented by Alta Via Consulting (altavia.com) for a Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association (mesa.org) analytics working group project.

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ENTERPRISE VIEW 43 AW JUNE 2022

Manufacturing in the Metaverse

By Brian May Managing Director, Industrial North America, Accenture

T

he metaverse is the likely future of the internet. And as it takes shape, today’s disparate collections of websites, applications, and internet-enabled services will be transformed into a series of persistent shared virtual 3D environments that exist in tandem with the physical world. This resulting spectrum of digitally enhanced worlds, realities, and business models is what we define as the metaverse continuum.

Eventually, people will be able to enter, explore, interact with, and exit these environments as quickly and easily as they access the internet via their smartphones today. And these experiences will be supported by emerging Web3 data technologies such as distributed ledgers, cryptocurrencies, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The promise of the industrial metaverse

What are the practical implications for industrial companies? Consider some of the potential benefits. By extending digital twins of industrial and manufacturing systems into metaverse-like spaces, companies could acquire an accurate 3D virtual representation of every plant or facility they operate.

Imagine if each of those virtual plants was able to show a full range of business and operational data in real time. It would open up new ways to view, explore, and access core operational information and insights—at every level from enterprise-wide down to individual machines and components.

On one hand, leaders would have a new way to view their businesses holistically, bringing together data from a range of disparate sources to visualize how the organization is functioning in real time. On the other hand, shop floor engineers could use these virtual spaces to

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monitor performance, spot issues, and even fix problems at a very granular level, as if they were really there.

Rewriting remote collaboration

This would have obvious advantages for difficult to reach locations like oil rigs, mines, and remote facilities. A single engineer could work remotely from the office (or even from home) to advise field technicians in many such locations—or even perform certain tasks themselves.

But the benefits potentially extend across the full range of industrial operations. Collaboration in areas like industrial design could be transformed. Designers could meet in virtual spaces to discuss ideas while exploring an accurate 3D representation of their design. Suppliers could also be brought into these spaces to advise on the integration of their components.

And what about the impact on industries like construction? Imagine, for example, a construction supervisor working on site, who is able to join a virtual meeting with the local planning inspector. With everything they need to hand in the virtual space—architectural drawings, planning documentation, real-time site video feeds via drones, and so on—the whole meeting could be completed in a matter of minutes.

When entire extended value chains can meet in the metaverse like this, productivity could skyrocket. It’s one reason that 71% of global executives think the metaverse will have a positive impact on their organizations according to Accenture’s Technology Vision 2022.

The metaverse today

Early forms of metaverse-like spaces are already emerging. BMW, for example, is building realtime digital twins of 31 different factories. The environment can be used for everything from training robots to experimenting with new line layouts, to running simulations virtually.

But it’s the blend of the virtual and the physical that will ultimately be the key capability for the industrial metaverse. Reflecting this, BMW’s digital twins are also connected to each factory in the physical world. That means employees can push software updates, assign tasks to robots on the floor, and even teleoperate certain machines to complete individual tasks.

Get ready for the future of the internet

Given that the metaverse is still in its infancy, what should industrial companies be doing today? A key priority is to invest in the technology foundations that will enhance their ability to adapt to future change as this new landscape evolves.

That includes expanding the use of cloud technologies—which is now a must for every industrial business. Similarly, continuing to invest in digital twins is vital, as these will be a central component of the industrial metaverse.

Companies should also keep abreast of advances in areas like virtual reality, augmented reality, distributed ledgers, and virtual marketplaces. These are the technologies that will open up new experiences and new value as the metaverse takes shape.

By extending digital twins of industrial systems into metaverse-like spaces, companies could acquire an accurate 3D virtual representation of every plant or facility they operate.

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44 ENTERPRISE VIEW AW JUNE 2022

Crossing the Great Divide in Industrial Transformation

By Diane Sacra LNS Research

Industrial Transformation leaders must reorient or reject the core processes they needed to deliver early successes and adopt a different set of operating procedures for lasting impact.

In other words, manufacturers must be able to rearchitect their Industrial Transformation programs in mid-flight.

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T

he concept of transformation is referenced all around us. You don’t have to look far to find it in headlines about health, science, politics, society, and more. As such, it’s no real surprise that transformation is also an important topic among manufacturers, especially as they face innovations and challenges in production, quality, operations, technology, and the supply chain.

When it comes to committing to Industrial Transformation (IX), we are seeing some real successes. The hard work is being done and it’s paying off for manufacturers who are taking their IX journey seriously. According to LNS Research data, IX leaders are 72% more likely to have grown revenues by more than 10%, and 57% more likely to have reduced cost of goods sold by more than 10% as a result of their IX program. While these early successes are certainly promising news for manufacturers, to create long-term and sustainable IX results, there needs to be a bit of transformation to the transformation itself.

According to Tom Comstock, principal analyst at LNS Research, IX leaders must “reorient or reject the core processes they needed to deliver early IX successes and adopt a different set of operating procedures for lasting impact.” In other words, Comstock is stressing the fact that manufacturers must be able to rearchitect their IX programs in mid-flight.

The biggest reason this is necessary for longterm IX strategy success is the challenging, albeit crossable, divide between those early successes and sustainable IX. Comstock explains that this gap exists between the processes for success in early-stage IX programs and those processes that work for more mature programs. “Crossing this transformation chasm is the fundamental differentiator between success and stagnation/failure in IX,” says Comstock.

Many of the challenges to long-term, sustainable IX can be found in four necessities of getting an IX program off the ground: team staffing, processes, strategies, and methodologies. These four elements must continue to evolve within the IX program so as not to become burdensome to it down the road.

To do this effectively, one of the first steps a manufacturer should take in getting past the transformation chasm is recognizing upfront that the chasm does, in fact, exist and mapping out

an effective roadmap to cross it. Planning for the long-term stages early on in the IX program is a key preparation step according to Comstock.

Following are Comstock’s five key recommendations for manufacturers: • Begin focusing on building the infrastructure work as soon as practical.

• Select easy use cases that also help build the data infrastructure over the long term.

• Create a “to-be” operational architecture that explains how the IT, OT, and new digital technologies will work, thereby providing a goal that can be referenced to accelerate IT and OT integration.

• Build digital ambassadors across the manufacturing network to accelerate the rollout of solutions.

• Work with the finance organization early on to ensure program/corporate resources and budget for plant rollouts.

Taking these early steps to prepare for the long-term needs of the IX journey will help pave the way for sustainable results. But as important as these steps are, it’s equally important to realize they are just the beginning given that there are four stages of IX identified by LNS Research. Each of these stages come with their own needs, challenges, and best practices.

“For manufacturers to succeed in IX, they need to initiate their program with one set of processes, structures, and teams and then readjust all those factors to succeed in the long run,” says Comstock. “Jumping the transformation chasm is hard, but it is fundamental to IX success. Manufacturers can accelerate their leap by incorporating as many IX best practices as early as possible into their program.”

To learn more about IX and Comstock’s latest research, visit www.lnsresearch.com.

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ADVERTISER INDEX 45 AW JUNE 2022

COMPANY

WEBSITE

PAGE

ASCO LLP - Emerson

www.Emerson.com/automation

AutomationDirect

www.automationdirect.com

2

AVEVA Software, LLC

www.aveva.com/align-your-teams

7

Beckhoff Automation

www.beckhoff.com

Digi-Key Corp

www.digikey.com/automation

Emerson Automation Solutions

www.Emerson.com/DeltaV

48

Hammond Manufacturing

www.hammondmfg.com

25

icotek North America

www.icotek.com

29

Inductive Automation

www.inductiveautomation.com

Opto 22

www.op22.co/rioemu

PACK EXPO International

www.packexpointernational.com

PMMI ProSource

www.ProSource.org

19

Telemecanique Sensors

www.tesensors.com/Safety

15

35

23 5

Cover-wrap 47 9

Automation World ® (ISSN # 15531244, USPS 22435) is a registered trademark of PMMI, The Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies.

Automation World ® is published 12 a year by PMMI with its publishing office, PMMI Media Group, located at 401 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 1700, Chicago, IL 60611; 312.222.1010; Fax: 312.222.1310. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing offices. Copyright 2022 by PMMI. All rights reserved. Materials in this publication must not be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. Applications for a free subscription may be made online at AutomationWorld.com/subscribe. Paid subscription rates per year are $105 in the U.S., $147 Canada and Mexico by surface mail; $250 Europe, South America. $325 Far East and Australia by air mail. To subscribe or manage your subscription to Automation World, visit AutomationWorld.com/subscribe. Free digital edition available to qualified individuals outside the United States. POSTMASTER; Send address changes to Automation World®, 401 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 1700, Chicago, IL 60611. PRINTED IN USA by Quad Graphics. The opinions expressed in articles are those of the authors and not necessarily those of PMMI. Comments, questions and letters to the editor are welcome and can be sent to: editors@ automationworld.com. We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you would prefer that we don’t include your name, please write us at the Chicago, IL address. Volume 20, Number 6.

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6/1/22 1:55 PM

46 KEY INSIGHTS AW JUNE 2022

As robots become more commonplace in society, widespread education about their use and operation will be required at primary and secondary schools, as well as at colleges and universities.

David Miller on ABB’s three robot predictions for 2022.

As manufacturers scrambled to keep factories running and remote personnel productive during the pandemic, they invested in edge and cloud technologies to enhance performance monitoring, collaboration, quality assurance, and predictive maintenance applications. Sixty-two percent of responding companies to the Automation World survey said they were leveraging cloud technologies, and 55% confirmed deployment of edge technologies—both a significant bump over the prior year.

Beth Stackpole on how edge computing investments and application are changing manufacturing data analytics strategies.

Specific actions being taken by Siemens as part of its transformation include an acceleration of the company’s focus on small to mediumsized businesses (SMBs) and simplifying the delivery and operation of their products for this audience; and targeted investments in cloud and edge computing, additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and 5G. David Greenfield on Siemens announcement that it is becoming a “tech company.”

First, they want to remove paper processes from the factory floor. Second, they want to build knowledge into those processes, especially as people need to manage multiple jobs. And third, they want to onboard new workers faster by capturing and transferring the knowledge from experienced workers and retirees.

Stephanie Neil on the digital transformation of the industrial workforce.

Replacing an entire palletizing system is a large undertaking from a logistics, financial, and time sink standpoint. However, like other equipment, it can be treated as a targeted risk-based obsolescence upgrade that considers the relevant mechanical and electrical issues.

Bryan Little with system integrator Avanceon on palletizer upgrades.

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5/31/22 2:32 PM

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