While the industrial Internet of things (IIOT) holds tremendous growth potential for manufacturing and processing organisations looking to leverage from the increased efficiency, productivity and agility, many of these operations still rely on dated and, in some instances, decades old production systems.
So, how then can manufacturers create a bridge between their legacy automation systems and the technologies that enable them to reap the advantages of the IIOT?
Richard Sharod, Africa & Middle East Regional Director at Stratus Technologies, the leading provider of availability solutions, believes there are a number of key success factors when it comes to achieving next-generation automation capabilities in legacy manufacturing environments.
"Because sharing and consolidating data is the key to unlocking the benefits of the IIOT, one of the first things manufacturers need to look at is interoperability. In many instances, industrial environments tend to be composed of discrete automation systems that are often not tied together.
"The problem with this disconnected approach to data storage is compounded even further if the older automation systems are based on proprietary technologies, which makes them difficult to integrate with other data stores.
"It thus becomes important to ensure any new systems that are installed are interoperable and based on industry-standard components. Here, organisations wanting to move towards IIOT not only stand to benefit from increased flexibility, but also reduced costs," he comments.
While the value of industry-standard systems in terms of reduced hardware costs and increased flexibility is well recognised, Sharod says it is equally critical to select systems that allow the easy extraction and consolidation of data.
"Here, ensuring the new programmable logic controller collects useful data frequently enough and makes that data available to a centralised data store is a crucial part of the IIOT," he adds.
When it comes to moving towards an IIOT infrastructure, while much of the latest automated manufacturing equipment typically has embedded sensors for collecting data, Sharod explains it is possible to overlay legacy, and in so doing, push intelligence to the so-called edge.
"Being able to drive analytics through these sensors means manufacturers can move towards a proactive, as opposed to a reactive, approach to maintenance, one that ultimately avoids unplanned downtime and instead maximises productivity," he comments.
However, for Sharod, manufacturers that opt to go the IIOT route must view fault tolerance as a mission-critical priority.
"Minimising downtime is particularly important in an IIOT infrastructure where data is central to manufacturing operations and where any lost data can have a huge impact on the accuracy and reliability of the analytics.
"However, ultimately, the good news for manufacturers with legacy automation infrastructures is that you can reap the benefits of the IIOT without having to swap-out existing systems," he concludes.
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