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Bridging Digitalisation and Automation to Deliver Modern Capabilities

Digitalisation unites many diverse strands into a cohesive solution. To excel in digital manufacturing, leaders need to focus on the outcomes with the highest impact.

Across the manufacturing sector, there have been changes in how businesses approach automation, as the universal shift towards digitalisation becomes a greater reality.

Automation in manufacturing has historically focused on a hardware-centric model. This has been ingrained across the supply chain from OEMs and resellers through to their end-user customers. Under this model, it’s common for there to be minimal interaction between the OEM and the manufacturer post-point of sale, except for planned maintenance periods. In such circumstances, the end customer has the competencies it takes to specify its own requirements through the value chain.

Digitalisation, on the other hand, requires a different approach. It is inherently outcome-based and requires the ability to unite many diverse strands, such as data, cybersecurity, and 3D modelling into a cohesive, continuous model and solution. The competencies and capabilities that were sufficient to deliver on hardware or automation goals are now insufficient to deal with the demands of the modern, increasingly software- and cyber-centric manufacturing environment, starting with the end user, let alone all machine manufacturers.

To excel in this new paradigm, manufacturing companies need to channel their focus towards the outcomes that will have the highest business impact and develop a supporting ecosystem that can help to embed digital capabilities into the foundation of their production environment. And in doing so, find the right vendor partners who can help them highlight their most promising areas of productivity gains, and define solutions and technologies around them.

Adapting to the Age of Connectivity

At a global level, manufacturing leaders are preparing for the massive demographic and technological changes that will impact their businesses over the coming decade. Undoubtedly, the knowledge and skills involved in designing and commissioning a hardware-focused production environment will remain valuable in a digital environment and must be retained.

However, in many businesses there are emerging generational and knowledge gaps across the organisational structure in terms of integrating a digital culture. Skills such as software development, data analysis, data science and cybersecurity are becoming core competencies, yet these skills are often scarce across the industry. Talent in these areas is looking for challenges that excite them and offer a clear path to career development, bringing increased competition to retain these skills.

Manufacturers (and vendors alike) need to think carefully about how they integrate these capabilities into their model – whether by hiring, partnering or acquiring. For this they must consider how best to bridge and integrate those new skills and profiles without damaging their existing culture.

Revolutionising Conventional Manufacturing Business Models

To achieve the goal of uniting digitalisation and automation, IT and OT in other words, the focus should be on implementing solutions that will generate better manufacturing performance. Accomplishing this will allow end-user customers to make their business more profitable and sustainable.

This shift towards digitalisation entails a new business model. In this model, the relationship between manufacturing end users and the OEM (machine builders) evolves, becoming more dynamic and lifecycle focused. Using machine data, OEMs can be more proactive in predicting issues and identifying opportunities for improvement. This will help manufacturers to get more value out of their machine investments. However, today, still few OEMs are able to monetise this data stream into valuable, lifecycle and annual recurring revenues for both themselves and their customers.

Ultimately, the technology vendor and OEM partners in this context need to play a more consultative role in terms of suggesting value-add components on an ongoing basis. Their support becomes a necessity for the manufacturer to achieve their intended outcomes.

Digitalisation, Scalability and Security

Scalability is a crucial component in enabling manufacturers to be more adaptable to changing circumstances, such as increased product demand. It’s important therefore that manufacturers leverage the economies of scale that come with digital solutions, helping to reduce cost, increase agility and reduce time to market.

A major component in the scalability challenge is maintaining security as operations and the footprint of digitalisation on their plant floor grow. There is a price to scalability as growing operations without proper planning around IT/OT security can introduce new vulnerabilities that may emerge further down the line.

End-user customers often have multiple plants, with potentially aging equipment that involve different layers of automation and use multiple protocols. These machines often can’t be modernised and so it’s difficult to firstly digitalise, and then scale in this type of environment. The priority is to transition towards integrated architectures that use standardised, Ethernet IP from top to bottom of the manufacturer’s enterprise network.

This helps remove the risk of “blind spots” (or un-connectable automation ‘islands’), improve the accessibility of data and give executives and operators more reliable data for making key decisions.

Such an environment requires careful planning and design, based on the desired outcomes. This brings a need for a consultative approach to navigate the transition and ensure that security is embedded from the beginning. Such an approach requires partners to work together closely to identify potential problems and filter the most appropriate solutions. It also brings an urgent need for cyber services that can proactively check for vulnerabilities in the many links between machines and devices.

Bridging Automation and Digitalisation, OT and IT

For modern manufacturing businesses, having the capability to implement software solutions on a wide-reaching scale, while standardising operations and solutions, matters greatly. It’s important that manufacturers have a partner ecosystem in place that can articulate the problems they are trying to solve and then explain the solutions and technologies they need.

Forming an ecosystem of specialist partners can help guide manufacturers through the process in a profitable and sustainable way, both in integrating partner capabilities and in gaining access to specialised skills from the ecosystem. It is also a sine qua non condition to scale in a way that is economically feasible.

Technology vendors have an important role here in terms of advising the best solutions, which means that they need to understand the desired outcomes before they sell solutions. This starts with a proper identification of pain points to illustrate what’s been successful in other environments and how similar solutions can be implemented within their existing operations. The best-of-breed cyber and digital solution vendors have libraries of use cases to pull from in each, targeted to help customers navigate their journey towards greater productivity and profit.

Those vendors with that type of knowledge, and a track record of being able to explain and develop viable digital solutions for their customers (machine builders and/or end users) will be best positioned in the software and network solutions mark.

You can learn more about achieving a successful digital transformation at the Management Perspectives hub, where you will find a wealth of resources for executive industrial decision-makers.

Published January 19, 2022

Pierre Teszner

Regional Vice President Central & Eastern Europe, Rockwell Automation

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