1. How would you define what digital transformation is within the realm of industrial automation and its connection to the cloud?
In industrial automation, technologies such as the cloud, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) are key enablers for digital transformation – which is the process by which manufacturers integrate such digital technologies to grow and evolve the automation of production workflows and machinery across the factory and supply chain.
More specifically, I like to look at it in four aspects:
- Leverage analytics to optimize production and empower workers with actionable insights
- Digitize production workflows to improve agility, quality and visibility
- Enable digital engineering to do more in a safer, more collaborative, and more cost-effective virtual environment
- Connect people, systems, machines and supply chains
In short, digital transformation helps to improve productivity, achieve faster time to market and increasingly – helps meet sustainability goals for manufacturing companies. And cloud is one of the key technology enablers of digital transformation.
2. What are the key business drivers for the growth of cloud-based applications in manufacturing over the past five years?
The need for digital transformation in the wake of the pandemic has been a significant accelerator for cloud in manufacturing. Firstly, it provides the opportunity for greater simplification from an information technology (IT) standpoint; cloud-based applications enable moving IT equipment and their management off-premise, alleviating the workload of IT teams who are often overloaded managing existing assets, and reducing the need for upfront capital expenditure.
Furthermore, moving applications to the cloud provides the speed and agility that manufacturers and producers are increasingly looking for today. Project implementation timelines can be compressed by up to 90%. A large manufacturing execution system (MES) deployment in the cloud can be delivered three to six months faster than the equivalent on-premise implementation. This could mean being three to six months ahead of the competition, which is a lifetime in the current business environment! And when the time comes to expand the solution or extend to other facilities, the cloud can scale up gracefully.
Another reason more manufacturers are considering switching to the cloud is increased visibility and collaboration. The cloud is a layer of IT that sits above all your manufacturing sites, making it possible to provide oversight of all production processes more easily. This increases collaboration, access to remote expertise and benchmarking across facilities. The need for greater visibility into production operations was the main reason REE Automotive, a provider of electric vehicle (EV) platforms, chose Plex MES for their digital backbone, as they scale their operations across multiple plants globally.
3. What has changed over the years in terms of reliability, speed and security regarding manufacturing applications in the cloud?
There have been huge improvements across these three dimensions and will continue to improve every year.
Reliability: Cloud solution providers have made significant investments in infrastructure and redundancy to deliver higher levels of reliability. Cloud platforms are designed to handle large-scale workloads and unpredictable traffic patterns that are common in manufacturing applications. Most software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that promise typical application availability of 99.5% or beyond, which is important for mission-critical applications that need minimum downtime. We put great focus on this area and are proud of the track record of our platforms such as Plex, with 99.994% or better availability recorded from 2018-2022.
Another concern in some geographies is the reliability of internet access itself. This can be mitigated with multiple types of access configured for automatic failover, e.g., two different wired ISPs and a 5G connection.
Speed: Advances in network infrastructure and traffic management have enabled lower latency and processing times, resulting in quicker round-trips. Software-defined wide area network (SDWAN) technology solutions can be leveraged to optimize and prioritize traffic through load-balancing across multiple ISPs. And for the lowest latency application requirements, many cloud solutions incorporate an edge component that provide local buffering and compute.
Security: What used to be a nice-to-have is now a must-have. Companies are taking security more seriously and most boards have it on their agenda. As such, cloud solution providers have made large investments in security and compliance to address concerns around data privacy and security. By using reliable cloud-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, manufacturers can benefit from the expertise and resources of the provider to enhance their cybersecurity posture through features such as encrypted data storage, multi-factor authentication, and automatic software updates, aiding in enhancing the security of the systems and the data stored in them.
SaaS providers typically invest significant resources in securing their systems and maintaining compliance with security standards such as ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2. This can help to provide a higher level of security compared to on-premise solutions, which can be more vulnerable to attacks.
When you move to the cloud, there is continuous innovation because the software becomes version-less i.e., always up to date, with many more deployments per year versus an upgrade every few years like the case of on-prem software. This empowers the end user with new capabilities and streamlined functionality through iteration based on usage.
4. For a company that is fully on-premise, what is the framework or steps to move to cloud? Is it all cloud or a hybrid?
The approach will be different for a greenfield versus brownfield plant. In general, the process of moving to the cloud will be easier for a greenfield plant since there is no existing infrastructure to migrate. However, a brownfield plant may have existing investments in hardware and software that can be leveraged and integrated with the new cloud-based infrastructure.
For brownfield plants, you may not want to migrate to cloud a new or recently modernized application, because the total cost of ownership (TCO) may not check out. But there is opportunity when adding new value-added applications or modernizing existing ones. A cloud-based Computerized Maintenance Management System™ (CMMS) like Fiix is something you could get up and running within minutes, for instance, unlocking AI-enabled capability running in the cloud.
But to do this at scale, the best way is to map out your existing applications across the entire lifecycle and the production system, and evaluate platforms that can converge many of these applications like the Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform™.
You’ll likely end up with multiple platforms or applications because one cannot do it all, so integration will be important. From this perspective, it’s important to look for applications and platforms that offer comprehensive APIs to simplify integration.
On the other hand, a hybrid approach may be more appropriate if you need to keep some applications and data on-premise, while moving others to the cloud. This may be the case if you have legacy systems that cannot be migrated to the cloud or if you have regulatory or compliance requirements that dictate where data can be stored.
5. How is Rockwell Automation helping manufacturing companies interested in embedding cloud technologies as part of their business?
We are here to support customers with their digital transformation journeys, at whichever stage they are at, by building an ecosystem of cloud-native capabilities across the Design, Operate and Maintain lifecycle of a Connected Enterprise® production system.
We are doing this through a series of significant in-house developments, technology partnerships as well as the recent acquisitions of Plex and Fiix® that complement our on-premise FactoryTalk® Hub™ software offerings. Our partnership with Microsoft helps us deliver trusted and industry relevant solutions built on a globally recognized cloud platform like the Azure public cloud platform.
Not all companies will leverage cloud technologies for all their applications. Most will maintain a mixture of applications on-premise and in the cloud, depending on what makes sense for the business at the time.
The cloud offers so many advantages for manufacturers and producers, including the ability to access the software anytime, from anywhere around the world, avoiding upfront IT hardware costs, simplifying IT management, improved security posture and continuous innovation with version-less software which is always up to date. There are so many advantages that I would ask – can you afford not to adopt cloud for your operations?
