Working With IT

Marriage Made Where?

Engineering has traditionally not courted corporate IT and vice-versa. If they join, the marriage may or may not be made in heaven.

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 havea three groups across the IT-engineering divide,” says Julie Fraser, principal and industry analyst at Industry Directions, Commaquid, 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. &ldqou;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, “sIt’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 zeroes rampaging right now through control systems becomes 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 zeroes 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 realm, let alone all of the details about what other functions need. She is currently involved conducting a research study, commissioned by the Manufacturing Enterprise 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.” Read more...

Like Putting Out Fire With Gasoline - It works either way. Say you're an engineer and you've been implementing Ethernet for a lot of your control system communications. Then corporate tells you that getting manufacturing data moved into its enterprise systems is becoming a crucial competitive necessity. In order to accomplish this, you will have to work closely with someone from the information technology (IT) group. “Whoa! Hold on,” you think.

Filler Facilitates 21 CFR Part 11 Compliance - Web-enabled and Ethernet-ready, this liquid filler makes it easier for drug makers to generate FDA-recommended electronic record-keeping. “We needed built-in Ethernet and Web communications.” That’s how Rod Baker of Intellitech www.intellitech-inc.com describes some of the performance characteristics he and his team wanted to incorporate as they designed the intelliFiller Model AFS liquid filler. The machine is used largely by drug makers, for both clinical trials and full-scale production and packaging. These days, drug makers are keenly interested in packaging machinery that will facilitate the kind of electronic record-keeping spelled out in the FDA’s 21 CFR Part 11 requirements. Built-in Ethernet and Web enablement can both be useful tools where electronic record-keeping is concerned. Both these characteristics are successfully incorporated in the Model AFS thanks in part to the Rockwell Automation (www.rockwellautomation.com) Micrologix controller that’s on board. It’s small enough to meet Intellitech’s footprint requirements, yet it has a built-in Ethernet/IP port and a Web interface.

With Ethernet connectivity, says Baker, any change an operator wants to make to the machine gets recorded and time-stamped, and reflected in that record is the operator’s e-signature and user password. This data is then stored to a secured database. That provides the electronic audit trail documenting any modifications made, so it offers the customer an opportunity to become 21 CFR Part 11-compliant.

In addition, because the Model AFS liquid filler is Web-enabled, the secured database can be accessed remotely. That becomes useful if a manager in some location other than the plant in which the filler is located needs to access the database. Read more...

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