Use cases of Plex in the manufacturing industry

Transcript

Stan Miller: Hello everyone and welcome to ROK Studios. I’m Stan Miller, I’m the PR & Analyst Relations Manager for Rockwell Automation in the EMEA Region, and I’m here with Richard Holmes. He is an Information Solution Selling Executive with Rockwell. Richard, welcome to the studio. 

Richard Holmes: Hi Stan. How are you?

Stan Miller: I’m well. Thank you. And thank you for joining us. We’re excited to talk with you today because our topic is about addressing workforce challenges and streamlining processes with a cloud-based MES. So, we’re talking about some interesting technology and we’re also talking about some interesting potential outcomes, so let’s get to it.

Richard Holmes: Let’s try.

Stan Miller: All right. Just to get us started, how does a cloud-based MES, right, configurable modular, how does that help manufacturers address operational challenges, streamline processes, and achieve a quicker return on value?

Richard Holmes: I think my first answer to a question like that Stan, is you’re kind of hitting the number, the value in how you positioned the question, really. For a lot of years – you know, businesses have become more educated in and more acceptance of a shift of enterprise systems, to a cloud service - you know, we all carry a miniature computer in our pockets nowadays – you know, we are very much living that Star Trek telecommunicator type of lifestyle. 

In more recent years, you’ve seen that approach to modularity, flexibility, dynamism sort of shift across businesses and shift not just from the carpeted space – you know, where the traditional functions like finance, sales, marketing are conversing with using business applications, but it’s filtering down now as an approach and a technology set into the production floor, into the warehouse, into the goods yards, into elements that historically have never been considered. And the driver behind that, well, there’s multiples. 

There’s economic, there’s one of perceived risk, there’s one of perceived skills, either competencies, shortages – and we mention that flexibility in dynamism. There’s a speed of return on investment – you know, we all now live in a world where we download an app and we expect immediate gratification from it, we expect immediate value from that, and there is absolutely no reason why the factory floor should expect anything less than that today.

Stan Miller: Can you share a specific use case where a cloud-based MES has been successfully implemented and discuss some of the benefits experience? And it doesn’t have to be a super specific example, it can be high level or generic, but what comes to mind when I ask you that?

Richard Holmes: I think I can give you a couple of examples. There’s a heck of a lot more – you know, we could probably spend all afternoon, all day talking about examples. But from a cloud-based MES perspective – you know, you look at where businesses need to react quickly. So, we have examples where clients potentially reshoring operations, or quickly expanded, and that’s where they buy that new site and projects through acquisition, and there’s a need to get all aspects of the business on a level playing field. 

You know, we talk about the value of data, but data means nothing unless you can put it in context, you can have access to it at the right time, and you can rely on the accuracy of that. You know, being able to deploy a manufacturing execution system or some subset, some module within that type of framework quickly and effectively means that you can see an immediate impact on the business. Now, that could be increase in quality, in the products that you’re manufacturing, it could be improving some of the key statistics that are important to increasing your productivity, so the metrics around ROA which talk about a heck of a lot. 

It could even be in looking at the performance of the assets that run your factory floor. And in an ideal world, we want to treat all these sorts of scenarios in a holistic sense, we don’t want to create further challenges for ourselves. So, businesses are mindful that they need to respond quickly to customer requirements, so again – you know, historically, you may have paper-bear systems where, say in food and beverage, you’re required to submit an audit to your downstream customers – you know, provide proof that you can do a mock recall on an ingredient or a product. Traditionally, it would take the quality team a week to go through that process. 

You know, what value is there in being able to do that almost automatically and in a matter of minutes? It frees that quality team up to focus on the job at hand, the products that you are manufacturing today and support your operational team. We all know about challenges in the workforce, with – you know, an aging workforce – you know, workforce change - the employment market’s getting more competitive week by week almost. 

So, how do you capture and retain the IP that’s in your key workers, how do you disseminate and share that to the staff that you have coming in, your apprentices, your new starters, how do you make those teams more dynamic?

And that’s another great example where we see the rapid deployment of business applications on an operational level, supporting more dynamic production and operation teams, that instead of being focused on one task, now have to be able to be deployed across the operations. So, it’s all about quality, productivity, capturing and retaining the knowledge that you’ve got and also empowering your workers.

Stan Miller: Those are all really compelling examples. Let’s talk about how manufacturers can integrate their production planning with supply chain planning, using a cloud-based MES.

Richard Holmes: Yeah. So, out of all the challenges and some of those use cases that I’ve just referred to, one of the things that I’ve seen, in my work with customers and clients is that regardless of location, size, industry – you know, we see it on the news today, supply chains are global now. 

There is a decreasing, a smaller proportion of businesses that source locally and only locally and aren’t impacted by global supply issues and trends. You know, you look at one extreme, the electronics industry, all it takes is for one consumer manufacturer to release a new product and all of a sudden components can go into not just weeks, but months, possibly even years lead times. 

So, if you can have visibility of your output supply chain, if you can use that information – and notice I say information, not data, but contextual information, and start to bring it into and factor it into your production planning, then it allows you to get on the front foot with addressing some of the challenges that historically, again, you probably put teams of people onto in the past, to try and address and find your way around. 

It allows you to retain potentially better control over what sites, what lines are scheduled to produce what products, and fundamentally, that has a massive impact downstream in maintaining the support in the contracts that you have to deliver to your own customers and clients, maintaining and meeting your own quality issues, because from a supply chain issue, you’re not scouring the region or the globe for substitute parts what you then have to revalidate into the design of the version and of the product that you manufacture. 

So, to put it quite simply, supply chain planning becomes a viable option to mold onto the production planning systems that you use today. And again, if you take a modular platform approach to that, you can start to address potential issues in complexity and risks that you might have in taking desperate systems and trying to mesh them together to do that.

Stan Miller: Richard, you talked earlier about workforce, let’s dig into that a little bit more.

Richard Holmes: Yeah.

Stan Miller: In the context of workforce challenges, how can a cloud-based MES support operators, capture institutional knowledge, facilitate continuous improvement?

Richard Holmes: Yeah. I’ve worked in multiple industries and segments over my career, and one thing that I would say is – you know, the manufacturing sector, one of the things that – you know, really jumps out is that a lot of businesses are very good at retaining key staff and promoting from within based on skills and experience, and this is absolutely fabulous. 

I think we take it far more for granted than potentially we should, compared to other sectors. With that though, comes an element of risk because of lot of the information that we “traditionally” captured, it either relies on Joe or Josephine on a production line hearing something that might be out of kilter, seeing something that they know is a precursor to something that’s happened in the past. 

And we talk about responding based on a gut feel, I know that’s going to lead to something. That experience, that gut feel, that knowledge that they’ve gained over ten, 15, 20 years, if you’re lucky, it’s documented in paper files at a workstation in the plant, if you’re lucky. It might be documented on a Word document that’s sat in a Share point somewhere, if you’re really lucky. But what happens when you have natural workforce churn, what happens when you bring in new workers, what happens when you expand your business. 

Not being able to access that information, not being able to capture that from your knowledge-ness at a day to day level and fundamentally have a knock on impact on the quality of the product that you’re ultimately manufacturing and also on the efficiencies of your production systems. 

So, if you can have the support as an operator of a digital solution, something that you can readily access, worksheets, SOPs, manuals through; if you can have the support of knowing that there’s an up to date validated check sheet that you can reference, to help guide you through an operation, that’s very akin and very like this sort of value that we take for granted, sat at a desk, working on a business application, whether it be again sales, CRM, ERP. 

There’s absolutely no reason why an operator, who’s not desk space, should not expect to have that similar sort of support to do their job. And the payoff is you can rapidly push skills and experience to your wider workforce. You can engage the workforce that you have so that they perceive the value that they have to give back to the business. And at a business level, you protect yourself from Joe or Josephine retiring and you losing that corpus of information. 

So, there’s two parts to it, there’s capturing the knowledge that you’ve got and the support in the operators to make sure that the decisions and the actions they take are absolutely as close to being one hundred correct time after time after time after time.

Stan Miller: Richard, how does a cloud-based MES contribute to the integration of systems to protect businesses from the risks associated with substandard products and disconnected processes?

Richard Holmes: Yeah, I think I’ve given reference to that during our conversation, Stan. And yeah, a cloud-based system, first and foremost, if you have a modular configurable approach to – as a technology company, how we put our solutions on the ground, metaphorically speaking. You can shorten that project time to deploy an application, so all the great value that we’ve spoken about, it’s more impactful if we can get that to operators in a shorter period of time as possible. 

If we have a 12, 18 month cycle to build something that’s unique for one particular customer, that brings an inherent risk in the business. So, first and foremost, addressing that risk, modularity, configuration of a solution rather than highly customization reduces risk, increases getting access to that. 

And again, if we’re deploying that from the cloud, we can quickly take that template and deploy it to site one, site two, we can spread it across the business, at a line or a plant level, department level as quickly as the customer would like and far more quickly than if we were deploying in a more traditional un-prem, build something specifically for a client. So, that’s for me, the key to looking at the de-risk of why would we go cloud. 

The other element is what’s the scalability? And not just the scalability within one client, but the scalability of a platform, and that links to de-risk as well, because if you have hundreds of clients that are running their business, either key operators, that plant, wall to wall, or the full business, wall to wall, from one platform, then you have a corpus of skills at a vendor level, but also a corpus of skills within that community of users. 

And certainly from a risk scandal, and the time to value, I’d look at the value that you gain from that community of users as well – you know, because it all impacts – you know, we’re all fundamentally using the same set of technologies. So, shared experiences, shared challenges, shared work-rounds, that again, speeds that time to value and time to deploy.

Stan Miller: Richard, I don’t have any more questions for you. This has been a great discussion. Thank you for joining us in the studio today.

Richard Holmes: My pleasure, Stan.

Stan Miller: And thank you for watching. If you’d like to learn more about cloud-based MES solutions, visit www.rockwellautomation.com.