Cross-Connect Blog

Adopting IIoT? Here’s Five Disciplines to Consider for an Effective Project Team

October 22, 2019

istock-manufacturing.jpgThe adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in manufacturing facilities is strong. In fact, one of the top IIoT use cases, according to the Internet of Things Study by The MPI Group, is production and manufacturing monitoring. This is primarily because a manufacturing facility’s goals—improving product quality, increasing speed of operations and decreasing the cost to manufacture—heavily depend on production and manufacturing monitoring and predictive and condition-based maintenance.

In kind, these programs depend on reliable infrastructure and networks to collect and process data. In practice, the team tasked with implementing IIoT initiatives will need to create more space in the facility for compute, data storage and networking equipment, and plan for more—and faster—network connections to manufacturing equipment.

Assembling Your Network Deployment Team

If IT assumes all the planning, design, cost, risk, management and accountability for data and networks, the result may be too restrictive when it’s time to deploy new manufacturing technologies. This might cause delays or invalidate some of the future benefits of newer technology investments or services.

While an IT team has expertise in network design, systems administration and software integrations, they are not as well versed in specific manufacturing technologies and systems. This is where the control systems, automation, manufacturing and facilities engineers can provide valuable input on specific manufacturing systems and software integration. They can also provide what data is critical for operational decisions, the limitations of the facility, and the ideal procedures, workflows and responses to daily events. If these factors are identified early in the design phase, the information architecture and corresponding data network can be designed to allow more flexible response.

Five Disciplines Worth Considering:

1.)  Systems control/automation engineers (operational technologists) – this group knows what data is available, where to get it, and how it relates to overall processes; how to connect automation equipment and interfaces between automation network protocols and IT network protocols

2.)  Manufacturing engineers – this group is well attuned to operational procedures and workflows, and which data is most useful to operational decision making and upstream reporting; also how and when the production equipment will change

3.)  Logistics (planners) – this group has excellent awareness of material requirements, order points and critical inventory control metrics; and has the ability to set the capacities that drive the most critical processes

4.)  Facilities managers (maintenance engineers) – these are experts in the building subsystems, and establishing cabling pathways, delivery of power and cooling for automation and production equipment

5.)  Information technologist – this group maintains a strong understanding of the Ethernet network, networking equipment, computing, and database integration of manufacturing control and enterprise planning systems

To learn more about how to drive IT/OT collaboration in your business as you extend your network into nontraditional environments, read CPI's most recent white paper.
 
Posted by Brittany Mangan, Digital Content Specialist at 10/22/2019 1:56:23 PM
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