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You’d better take that call

Cell phones and PDAs are fun and convenient, but wouldn’t it be nice if these commercial technologies could make your life easier on the plant floor?

By using standard industrial Ethernet networks to mix commercial, business and industrial applications on a single network, manufacturers around the world are already able to mix commercial, business and industrial applications on a single network – changing the way they do business. As a result, they’re finding new opportunities to improve how their businesses operate and how their employees work.

These devices were originally designed for people on the go, and plant floor engineers easily fit in that category with today’s 24/7 manufacturing schedules. Indeed, many plant floor personnel now can leave the office and use commercial technologies to deal with issues anytime and anywhere they arise.

On the plant floor, PDAs can store custom programs or applications that help personnel perform tasks such as preventive maintenance or troubleshooting. They can provide access to an entire library of manuals and drawings, saving valuable time that would’ve been spent searching through hundreds of printed pages. Plus, a PDA’s portability means employees aren’t tethered to equipment.

The capabilities of mobile phones are increasingly expanding. For example, commuters can identify and pay parking fees by sending short text messages to parking operators to open virtual accounts. When the commuters want to leave, they call pre-determined telephone numbers to check their parking duration and account balance. With advances in GPS-enabled mobile phones, some commuters can find the quickest way to their parking spots to avoid traffic jams and construction detours.

Cell phone technology is being used on the factory floor to boost response times, provide early notification of impending failures and make changes to equipment configurations from remote locations. As wireless technology standards continue to develop and become more robust, manufacturers will have greater flexibility in how they deploy their equipment and people. Reducing the amount of factory floor wiring cuts wiring costs, reduces installation and configuration time, and allows users to move equipment throughout the facility with greater flexibility.

We have yet to see the full impact of commercial technologies on the plant floor, but the time between the invention of commercial tools and their adoption in the manufacturing environment is shrinking rapidly.

The increased use of standard, open networking architectures is helping users to exploit these commercial technologies and standard industrial Ethernet provides the ideal medium to mix commercial, business and industrial applications on a single network. TCP/IP is now the dominant protocol running on Ethernet networks on the factory floor.

A typical Ethernet-TCP/IP network may extend plant-wide and be connected to a company’s worldwide network via the Internet. The networks are generally used to conduct program maintenance, send data to and from management information systems (MIS) and manufacturing execution systems (MESs), perform supervisory control, provide connectivity for operator interfaces, and log events and alarms. More and more, Ethernet is being used as the real-time control network, connecting drives, I/O, robots and controllers. These functions require the high throughput and widespread accessibility that Ethernet offers.

The key to using Ethernet effectively for all of these tasks is a real-time, industrial protocol that can work side-by-side with the many commercial protocols for Web, e-mail and other applications. This real-time protocol must use standard, unmodified Ethernet TCP/IP/UDP rather than bypass it. Users can deploy Ethernet as they have in the past; using standard network products and standard infrastructure, taking advantage of the decades of training and experience they’ve gained from using Ethernet.

Several versions of industrial Ethernet protocols exist in the market, but only a few have delivered on this requirement, including EtherNet/IP backed by ODVA (www.odva.org) and Modbus-TCP supported by Modbus-IDA (www.ida-group.org).
When plants use standard industrial network protocols such as EtherNet/IP – the front-runner of all the industrial Ethernet solutions with more than 1 million nodes installed worldwide – the data location becomes irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if the data are in the business-level accounting system, an engineering database or halfway around the world. The data are accessible anywhere a network connection exists.

As commercial technologies and standard-compliant networks continue to penetrate the factory floor, the range of possibilities for manufacturing continues to expand. Just think: A plant engineer can leave work at the same time every day because the shift’s production data can be e-mailed to his phone. After dinner with his family, he can review the data, forward it for reporting purposes and make recommendations for the next shift.

Faster response times, reduced downtime and improved decision-making ability – it may all seem years away, but many progressive companies already are realising the cost and labour benefits that commercial technologies can deliver today.