As more end users move towards a connected enterprise, they require smart machines and equipment that easily integrate into a facility, provides access to information, and enables agile reaction to changing market demands. As an OEM, the first step in the process is to meet end users on their journey to The Connected Enterprise® and identify their needs. Once there is a clear understanding of the processes involved, you can then identify the right technologies and capabilities to meet these requirements.
End users are turning to information-enabled smart machines to provide simplified integration together with enhanced security and the ability to adapt to changing conditions and specifications. Smart machines and equipment help create new revenue streams while reducing risk and production costs – positioning you and your customer for greater success.
Smart Machine Services
OEMs and their customers are working together more closely than ever before. As end users journey towards The Connected Enterprise®, they are calling on machine and equipment builders’ expertise to provide services that leverage the data and connectivity of smart assets to help end users maximise their productivity.
This provides an opportunity for OEMs to deliver a new level of value while making both the transition from equipment vendor to trusted partner, and from one-time equipment sales to annual reoccurring service revenue. Smart machine services help differentiate your company and your offerings. They also open opportunities to work more closely with your users by helping them understand and solve the issues that may be holding them back.
This new strengthened relationship can benefit both of you. Your customers gain an expert that knows their smart machines or equipment inside and out and can help maximize their productivity, while you gain a closer partnership with your end users.
As a collaborator, you can create and scale services to help your end users be successful in smarter more proactive ways. Some examples include:
1. Remote Monitoring: This is a service most often discussed in the context of smart machines – and with good reason. It can help your users more quickly spot and address issues, dramatically reducing downtime. According to ARC Advisory Group, a survey of OEMs showed that “30 percent or more of the repairs can be made via the web by modifying parameters remotely or with minor assistance by an onsite person.”
Gaining access to machines and data remotely can help you discuss additional service options with customers. And you can use this data to improve your own engineering processes and machine productivity.
2. Outcome-Based Services: Smart machine services can use service-level agreements to give your end users a guarantee around specific outcomes. Some popular service-level agreements include response time of people and parts, equipment throughput and equipment availability. OEMS that have both remote visibility to equipment status and service capabilities to respond reactively and proactively are positioned to provide these guarantees.
3. Consumables as a Service: These services provide parts, materials and maintenance to help your customers achieve specific outcomes. For example, an OEM that provides case packers could deliver raw materials and consumable mechanical components as a monthly service to help the end user meet its production goals
4. Equipment as a Service: In this model, you don’t sell your machines or equipment but instead bundle the assets and any desired services – such as remote monitoring and proactive maintenance – for a flat monthly fee. Using the case packer example, the OEM could lease the case packer and remotely monitor its health for maintenance.
All these services allow you to become a true collaborator with your customers, playing an integral role in their operations to help them improve productivity and meet their business goals.
Smart Safety in The Connected Enterprise®
Safety professionals can use The Connected Enterprise® to improve safety, productivity and profitability. This data helps improve safety system visibility, understand safety risks, reduce safety related downtime, evaluate safety system use or misuse, and improve compliance.
To gain more diagnostic data, traditional safety devices required more complex wiring solutions. However, with a smart safety solution, you can now access more diagnostic data and simplify your wiring system. An integrated smart safety solution provides all the data needed to create a comprehensive picture of the status of the machine or production line.
Harnessing the power of safety and operational data can substantially improve safety compliance and performance. Accessing safety system data and transforming it into meaningful information results in increased machinery productivity and minimises downtime. In fact, a study by LNS Research revealed that companies have seen an average of 37 percent improvement in financial metrics from safety investments.
Digital Twins Take Machine Design to New Levels
To keep pace in the machine design industry, companies require a delicate balance of innovation and an ability to get their products to market on time and on budget. Typically, issues with new designs will become apparent during commissioning, once physical prototypes shed light on oversights and errors.
In fact, design issues found during commissioning are often acknowledged as simply the cost of doing business, given that new designs are crucial to the success of many. In the machine design industry, however, some companies are investing more resources in up-front design, drastically reducing the amount of issues they’ll encounter in the later stages of development.
Digital twins can help account for the dynamics of the entire system, in one unified modelling environment, helping provide specific information about the interactions between components. With this information available, engineers are given a new tool to spot design issues, especially when their products involve new, untested designs. When working on a new product in the conceptual phase, digital twins can play a huge role in giving engineers new abilities to work with designs.
Outside of a safer, more effective conceptual development phase, there are a wide range of benefits that engineers can implement by using digital twin technology for virtual design and commissioning. In addition, leveraging new technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) enable personal to experience the production environment and manufacturing process – long before facility start up. And these technologies simplify equipment interactions once a process is up and running.
