You know that you made the right decision to invest in a remote monitoring service when it catches a problem hours before your staff would have even noticed it. Such was the case at a Centria plant that custom coats coils of metal in Ambridge, Pa. A developing embossing problem was beginning to cause the metal to tear. Had it continued, the problem would have led to significant losses in product.

The vigilance of an off-site engineering crew averted these losses. From their offices, engineers with the InSite monitoring service offered by Milwaukee-based vendor Rockwell Automation Inc. identified the nascent problem and initiated the appropriate corrective action.

This incident is just one example of why a growing number of manufacturing facilities have found it profitable to hire vendors to monitor and maintain their machinery remotely. Although machinery builders and automation providers have been eyeing the enabling technology for quite some time now, communications were often cumbersome, thereby limiting the kinds of services they could offer. Now that relatively recent Internet Protocol (IP)-based Ethernet applications for remote diagnostics and maintenance have removed that limitation, more vendors are rolling out remote services.

Starting big

Builders of very large and expensive capital assets, such as power-generation equipment, have been delivering remote diagnostics for a while, according to Steve Carlson, Rockwell’s product manager for its remote diagnostics business. The high price tags on such equipment made it easier to justify the custom, proprietary connections that had been necessary to provide the services in the past.

Communications standards and falling price-to-performance ratios, however, have put the same ability within the budgets of smaller projects. “With the proliferation of Ethernet and IP-based communications on the factory floor, a lot of builders of smaller machinery are beginning to follow in the footsteps of the larger capital-asset builders,” says Carlson. “In many cases, though, they are offering more than just diagnostics services.”

Rockwell Automation got into this business because it had already developed the business processes and technology infrastructure necessary for supporting its own automation products in large, complex integrated-manufacturing environments. As machinery builders prepare to deliver suites of managed services remotely, they must build similar infrastructures for monitoring potentially hundreds of machines and managing and documenting incidents on each. “So, we’re partnering with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to leverage our infrastructure and processes to deliver those services to their customers,” explains Carlson.

At Centria, Rockwell Automation’s InSite service came bundled with a controls upgrade that the coater undertook on a coating line when it added a more modern second line. Since then, Rockwell engineers have been monitoring the controllers on both lines over a high-speed broadband connection, keeping the drives tuned, and looking for signs of trouble.

Whenever control parameters deviate beyond predetermined limits, the engineers notify Centria’s production people and begin troubleshooting the problem by checking the real-time and historical operating data logged by the control system. “It’s like having someone continuously standing over your shoulder, constantly pointing out potential problems and then letting you know how to correct them,” says Ron Mahan, plant engineer at Centria.

He reports that the service has helped his company not only to boost the productivity of its coating process but also to reduce downtime, scrap rates and damage to equipment. Before the control upgrade and monitoring service, several breakdowns a week had been costing the company at least $3,000 to $5,000 per hour in downtime. In the first year since the implementation, Centria needed a service technician to come on-site only twice.

Overcoming insecurities

Although remote diagnostic services have been around for a long time, many manufacturers have been reluctant to use them. One reason is that they are afraid to open their production systems to the outside. These fears are justified because it can take less than two minutes to penetrate an unprotected supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system running the Microsoft Windows operating system, according to Mike Rothwell, business unit manager for Americas Automation Systems at supplier Phoenix Contact Inc., of Middletown, Pa.

“Opening up a system to remote access via the Internet, or even to limited access within a plant-wide local area network (LAN), can introduce the risk of exposing confidential information to unauthorized users,” he says. “Worse yet, it can give someone—a hacker, a disgruntled employee—the opportunity to sabotage a machine or an entire plant.”

To protect users against such intruders, Innominate Security Technologies AG, a Phoenix Contact company based in Berlin, Germany, has designed its mGuard security products to be deployed at the ...