Manufacturing Convergence
Manufacturing has never been tougher - the global economic downturn has compounded existing pressures in the industry as manufacturers cope with ever increasing demands from customers for a wider range of product lines at lower prices; increasingly stringent regulations; and the environmental issues of sustainability.
In the face of such adversity, manufacturers can do one of two things; draw back and try to weather the storm or seize the opportunity to be more progressive and aggressive by evolving their business to win market share.
In the past, progressive manufacturers have often achieved this success with fundamental manufacturing process breakthroughs in the development of new manufacturing offerings but today the opportunity looks set to come from a different direction - Manufacturing Convergence.
Over the past decade, convergence has become a much overused word, but today the combination of technology maturity and economic necessity has made Manufacturing Convergence a manufacturing reality.
 |
Manufacturing Convergence is the merging of traditionally separate functions and systems to create new capabilities within the business. With people, processes and technology in unison, manufacturers can achieve higher levels of business performance, turn resources into assets and discover unique opportunities for competitiveness.
Manufacturing Convergence helps businesses respond to meet the four major market drivers — productivity, innovation, globalisation and sustainability — by allowing new combinations of technologies, people and processes.
Productivity has been the traditional manufacturing market driver. Lean manufacturing, quality, throughput and asset utilisation have been the foundations of an effective productivity culture, forming the basis for manufacturing competitiveness for decades. But today, those incremental benefits are becoming harder to squeeze out and business pressures are intensifying. Where will the next major productivity breakthroughs come from?
Globalisation is a market issue that is now at the top of everyone’s agenda. Globalisation promises nearly endless market potential, but it also brings new competitive challenges including commoditisation, product pirating and maintaining global standards. How will organisations survive in such an intense competitive environment without a radical rethink of their practices?
Innovation, whilst not new, has certainly leapt to centre stage in recent years, in part as a response to the pressures brought on by globalisation. Today, it is widely recognised that innovation must occur in all functions across the organisation. Manufacturing Convergence has a significant role to play here. Imagine a world where it may be possible to model your whole operation digitally so that new production concepts could be tested virtually; manufacturing equipment could be more quickly reconfigured in response to customer demand; or new machine designs could monitor their health, throughput and yield and report corrective actions to the maintenance staff.
And finally, Sustainability is an increasingly important business imperative. Spiralling energy prices are rewriting the economics of manufacturing. Safety of both products and processes is no longer an option; it is now an imperative to minimise the risk to your customers, your employees and the communities where you operate. What if energy costs could become a managed variable within your process control strategy? What if it was possible to measure and manage your carbon footprint and your process emissions to the benefit of the environment and your business?
|
All these advancements are now possible through a Manufacturing Convergence approach. Successful Manufacturing Convergence leverages the four core automation disciplines of Information, Communications, Control and Power to drive the business forward.
“We want to see where we can make a big difference,” said James W. Fonda, advanced technologist, Networked Systems, The Boeing Company. “You have to have information in a manageable form so you can act on it. By recording and proving out the data, we can show that we make a difference.”
The new goal is presenting information in context; delivering insight for better decision-making and exposing competitive opportunities. Today, all the information sources can be streamlined to allow configuration, visualisation, maintenance and optimisation of manufacturing processes and critical plant assets.
"We want our equipment notifying our people that something will occur so that they can observe that situation and take action before it becomes a 911," said Robert Schlafer, director of Engineering at PepsiAmericas.
Business value flourishes when IT and manufacturing departments can share information seamlessly and securely, while running multiple applications over the same network. Today standard, unmodified Ethernet is being adopted broadly across the plant and enterprise for data collection and real-time control. Emerging functionality such as voice, video and a range of mobility applications are beginning to appear in the plant environment; unleashing new opportunities for collaboration throughout the manufacturing environment.
Thanks to multiple control disciplines, control functions can be combined as the application demands. Today, a common control platform deployed plant-wide can help reduce integration costs, time to market and maintenance costs.
The control and management of power equipment in a plant is a competitive advantage in a world with spiking energy and downtime costs. Converging these strategic assets into the broader automation environment allows for greater coordination and optimisation of these strategic assets.
But despite the advances in technology, true Manufacturing Convergence is still a complex environment to achieve and it cannot be delivered by one supplier alone. Rockwell Automation, for example, delivers our convergence-ready solutions using our own technology and experience backed by a mix of strategic partners including Cisco, Dassault Systèmes and Microsoft. Our approach is founded on Integrated Architecture to allow manufacturers to build a business where information can flow across the organisation creating compelling competitive advantages.
To summarise, although the technology challenges for manufacturing convergence have been solved and the economic necessity for businesses to change is now stronger than ever, one of the few remaining potential barriers to this change will be people themselves. The walls between the enterprise, IT and the plant floor have long been in place but if manufacturers can break down these walls and push for Manufacturing Convergence, then despite the economic challenges, this difficult period in business history may still be seen as a major step forward in manufacturing.
For more information, please e-mail us at: info_at@ra.rockwell.com with ref: Convergence
Print Page
Locations Email Sitemap Legal Notices
Call 0870 242 5000 for General Enquiries 0870 241 1802 for Tech Support