Is plug and play a million miles away?
Charting progress toward a simplified, digital manufacturing world
There’s a reason the ‘app model’ has worked so well for modern smartphones. It gives the user access to 3 values they cherish highly: choice, control, and simplicity:
- Choice: finding and quickly deploying specific functionality on demand
- Control: maintaining a precise set of capabilities at the user’s discretion
- Simplicity: performing ‘touch of a button’ downloads that don’t require degree-level skills in software engineering
It’s a user experience that’s shaping expectations for how all interactions between humans and technologies should be. That said, there are obvious differences between downloading an app for job alerts, and enabling the plug and play vision for a manufacturing shop floor. What can be said with a degree of certainty however, is that the direction of travel appears set. Heading as it does toward an industrial network connecting together all machines and data, alongside the ability to make the introduction of new technologies, equipment, and workflows a ‘touch of the button’ action.
So, what is the current rate of progress toward plug and play? What major barriers exist, and what changes need to happen to turn ambition into reality? Let’s take a brief look.
Manufacturing ambition
The inspiration behind plug and play in manufacturing also draws directly on the desire for greater choice, control, and simplicity:
- Choice: as firms increasingly embrace the cloud, it becomes far easier to access new tools via the Software-as-a-Service model. Yet each new addition to the IT estate is only as good as the integration it can achieve with existing data sources and legacy equipment. Hence the appetite for plug and play functionality to enable this complex integration ‘as standard’.
- Control: where the goal is for all tools connected to different workflows and assembly lines to be easily managed, extended, and adapted via a single interface. Such a portal, typically offered via a Manufacturing Execution System (MES), will also enable real-time changes on the fly – and thus brings to life this shadowy concept known as “business agility”.
- Simplicity: the most treasured operator today, is an individual who’s able to combine years of assembly line and machine expertise with the knowledge of a software engineer. Unfortunately, such people are rare and therefore in high demand. But looking ahead, this issue is minimized when an integration platform is available – and smart enough – to remove all the complexity involved in connecting together all the language protocols prevalent on the shop floor.
Making the connection
This last point, the integration challenge, is arguably the biggest hurdle that needs to be overcome. An obstacle that gets bigger with every piece of technology found on the shop floor, including legacy equipment, IoT devices, hardware and software tools that combine to create end-to-end workflows.
Technologies that will typically speak in different languages.
As a result, making plug and play work means providing an integration layer that can dynamically accept all these different languages – before making them instantly understandable to other relevant tools. In addition, integration also needs to inspire useful outcomes. As an example, it’s no good having a MES interact with a lathe (providing detailed instructions/specifications) and requesting a digital record of what was done and when, only for the data received back to be an unintelligible series of digits.
Progress made
Today, the practical application of plug and play sits somewhere between theoretical discussion and cutting-edge experimentation. Progress is being made, but often with significant limitations surrounding what can and can’t be done. For example, a degree of plug and play is detectable inside some large manufacturers, but only at the expense of deploying technology exclusively from one vendor to minimize the integration challenge.
For smaller manufacturers, the reality is that most of their technology remains dedicated to achieving very specific tasks. While developments in more generalised equipment gathers pace (think cobots etc.), the real breakthrough will only occur when all different machines are able to interact with and share data with open-source connectors.
This is a goal that sits at the heart of a variety of research and innovation projects, including:
- COREF: the Connected Reconfigurable Factory – a consortium of business and academia led by Thales (and including MESTEC) that’s looking at Industry 4.0 technology for lower volume, higher complexity manufacturing environments
- The OMNIFACTORY: run out of the Aerospace Engineering Department at Nottingham University, and featuring a new £3.8 million facility that’s providing a ‘unique reconfigurable environment’
It should be noted however that side-by-side with technology innovation must also come cultural change, or at least the skills matrix available to businesses. That’s because the integration needed to fully enable plug and play will not arrive overnight. Instead, progress will be incremental, with each new step removing some of the technology burden – but not the full load in one go (at least not yet).
Such a situation puts the emphasis on digital skills, and recruiting people who want to actively work with software. An approach that doesn’t just mean upskilling the workforce. It’s more about building and maintaining a skills base that’s able to realize the full potential of plug and play – while also making the industry more attractive to younger people in the process.
Summing it all up
Plug and play is not a million miles away, but sizeable technology obstacles still need to be navigated. Yet as MESTEC is already demonstrating through the COREF initiative, MES systems are able to play the key role of ‘master controller’ within this brave new world. Bringing together the workflow management capabilities, orchestration, and analysis needed to deliver truly digital workflows and highly productive operations.
To understand what that could mean for your business, get in touch.
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