Can information technology (IT) and automation engineering work together? The short answer is yes. The long answer is also yes, but it is long indeed, with many avenues and byways. Yet, in too many companies, this is a friction drive that can generate a great deal of heat.

“A balanced company is likely to have three groups across the IT-engineering divide,” says Julie Fraser, principal and industry analyst at Industry Directions, Cummaquid, Mass. “In those companies, you will find enterprise IT, manufacturing IT and engineering. A lot of companies are highly successful in connecting business and engineering with this kind of basic structure, so you see it being applied more and more often.”

She continues, “But traditionally, and unfortunately for many companies today, the chasm can be deep between corporate IT and controls.”

Fraser, who has been an observer and analyst in computer integrated manufacturing and automation for many years, traces this chasm back to the initial development of microprocessor-aided controls in the late 1960s.

“The people developing control systems made conscious decisions to keep IT out of their hair,” she says. “At that time, real-time deterministic control needed special hardware, languages and operating systems. They knew what IT systems of the day could do, and they knew IT equipment wasn’t going to work for their applications.”

“There had to be computer platform differences in the beginning,” agrees Eric Cosman, engineering solutions architect for The Dow Chemical Co., in Midland, Mich. Dow is one of the companies that have worked long and hard to affect a marriage between IT and engineering. He adds, “It’s becoming more and more important for IT and engineering to work together, because we are now two organizations separated by common technology. We use the same commodity platforms, whether that be operating systems from Microsoft or standard hardware for networking. But, the applications are very different. You have to acknowledge those differences and avoid the temptation to extrapolate your own technology experience into domains other than your own.”

Fraser underscores that IT and engineering have very different objectives and time frames. “Engineering needs real-time data flow,” she says. “The intermediate manufacturing execution system (MES) layer wants data that could be anything from minute-by-minute, to hourly, to weekly. IT needs some things only monthly. The granularity is very different.”

How do the millions, perhaps billions, of ones and zeros rampaging right now through control systems become a handful of bytes on a monthly report? The further you move up the information systems ladder, the more you need data aggregation or data reduction.

“To aggregate or reduce data, you have to figure out what’s needed,” says Fraser. “All the ones and zeros are needed by the machine, but the front office doesn’t care about most of this. At the office level, you need a highly aggregated view: How is

actual production proceeding compared to this plan or schedule I sent down? Every function needs its own level of aggregation about what is happening with the product.”

The tricky part, Fraser says, is figuring out what data is critical to those outside your department. It is difficult enough to know what matters in your own realm, let alone all of the details about what other functions need. She is currently involved conducting a research study, commissioned by the Manufacturing Enter-prise Solutions Association International (MESA), called “Metrics That Matter,” designed to identify key performance indicators (KPIs)—those critical things that must be measured based on corporate strategy.

WHY COLLABORATE?

There are some good reasons why engineering might be interested in collaborative interaction with corporate IT and the executive staff. A primary one is an ability to tap into the skills of the IT department in getting funding for new systems. Less often mentioned, but in the long run perhaps more important, are the opportunities that are enabled by direct engineer-to-executive conversation. Top management knows engineering is important, but few of the players in the carpeted suites can follow more than the first sentence of a genuine technical discussion.

Fraser puts this more eloquently. “If we in controls and automation have someone who can communicate with executives, it’s far less difficult to justify systems and necessary improvements. We need to learn how to put things in terms that they care about. We need to learn how to explain things clearly, and we need to clearly demonstrate how we help make things a success at the company.”

There can be specific advantages to people-to-people IT/engineering communication on the production floor as well. ...