OWNING THE PROBLEM

The Intellic Integration and 4.0 Solutions team were at HANNOVER MESSE this week. We had a packed schedule that continuously changed based on what technology we thought was interesting and meetings with vendors and end-users attending the conference. One of my personal goals of the conference was to identify what new technologies the Intellic engineering team could add to the toolchain that deliver value for our clients and the broader 4.0 solutions community. My background is heavily rooted in the Manufacturing Execution and Operations Management space, so naturally I was on the hunt for what "MES" was on the bleeding edge, bringing something new into the market. Looking back at my notes at the end of day two, I had not even been to the booth of a major MES vendor. Instead I was speaking to new customers at the conference about there problems with MES and in some cases manufacturing in general. Paraphrasing some of the statements I heard in these discussions...

1. Our IT department has mandated that we only use open source technologies for everything that sits between the control system and the ERP. We want to contextualize the process data with production data based on the order that's being executed. What can be used to do this?
2. Our enterprise is shopping major MES vendors to be rolled out to over 200 facilities. What we've found is that no single vendor can meet the uniqueness of ALL facilities. We have several lines of business that span different types of manufacturing verticals. How can we integrate the facilities that the major vendors can't work with? Can we standardize on this integration across all facilities, even if an MES is not present?
3. My company is implementing many MES functions like routing and operation sequencing at the ERP level, how do I get this data in a place where the equipment at each operation can run correctly and exchange data?
4. Were building a greenfield facility in discrete manufacturing and are working with many of the OEMs building the equipment. We have an MES that needs this equipment data, but there are challenges communicating all the requirements of the MES? Have you done this? What was your approach?
5. Were launching a new line that is scaling a research and development area to mass production. We anticipate many change orders from the PLM that might move equipment around, change consumption points for certain material and so on. How have you seen enterprises manage these changes in an MES?

What was interesting about all of these conversations was that Intellic had come up against ALL of these problems since I started with the company 5 years ago. Not only has our team solved these problems, but we have OWNED them to completion. Moreover these were all solved without implementing a major commercial MES package. I don't want this article to turn into the age-old MES buy vs. build debate. I've come to realize there will always be justification to choose one approach versus the other. One of the reasons Intellic typically lands on the build your own side of this debate is the time to value for our customer, and typically the value realized is solving a major problem. I then asked myself how quickly can our engineering team solve system integration challenges, train our client on the toolchain we've implemented across the architecture and empower them to become their own problem solvers moving forward once the Intellic project has ended. With this in mind I spent the next two days at the conference looking at all the manufacturing technologies through this mindset - OWN THE PROBLEM.

By the end of the fourth day I'd come across a few technologies that clearly fit this mindset in the way they were presenting and engaging with people at the conference.

1. United Manufacturing Hub (UMH) / HiveMQ - These companies were sharing a booth, and while we've used some of these tools in production before, I was able to see examples of new modules and features that will be useful to the Intellic engineering team for quickly deploying Unified Namespaces - establishing the framework for which problems can be solved.
2. Nintex - This software is a workflow automation tool that allows you to orchestrate and monitor standard business processes across an enterprise. I see this useful for typical integrations between systems like the ERP, PLM, CMMS and MES. While I didn't dive deep technically into how this platform could fit into a UNS architecture, I'm eager to get under the hood and explore it's potential.
3. Exalens - This companies product is dubbed as a Unified Industry 4.0 Monitoring and Security platform. The demonstration provided here was one of the best I had personally, and when I saw the system I was able to rattle off several problems to be solved. Even better this technology will identify problems for you.

This video came to mind as I was working through this article.

What problems have you solved and then owned?

What technology was used for this?