Industrial Software Standards and Certification - Who Cares?
Bill Lydon
Digital Manufacturing Transformation Consultant - Manufacturers are at a pivotal tipping point requiring Digital Manufacturing Transformation to succeed and prosper or become non-competitive.
I recently wrote an article about conformance and certifications because I believe this is a missing link in achieving the goals of Industry 4.0 and manufacturing Digitalization. The article focuses on open programming standards and certifications but it also applies to all software and communications needed to achieve modern manufacturing goals.
The goals are clear: manufacturers & process production companies must digitize or they will be caught in a strategic gap putting them at a large competitive disadvantage. Achieving the benefits of digitalization requires organizations to leverage Industry 4.0 and IoT (Internet of Things) concepts, technology, and architecture with open standards. Vendor compliance and certification to open interoperable programming standards will accelerate the digitalization of manufacturing, production, and process industries.
The lack of full conformance and certification of programming standards prevents users from reusing engineered control and automation programs and controllers from different vendors. The computer industry solved similar kinds of problems years ago and could serve as a lesson.
“As the world of production faces a perfect storm wrought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the accelerating climate emergency, raising trade tensions and growing economic uncertainty, manufacturers must develop new capabilities and adapt.” Francisco Betti, head of Shaping the Future of Advanced Manufacturing and Production for the World Economic Forum
Productivity Drag or Accelerator
Regardless of the programming standard, there must be strong vendor compliance and certification of products in order to effectively ensure program portability and multivendor interoperability. This is been an ongoing issue in the industrial and process automation industry.
The lack of vendor full conformance and certification to open programming standards creates tremendous inefficiencies and architectural challenges that lead to isolated “islands” of control.
Integrating these islands into an entire plant architecture requires a great deal of application engineering, extra hardware, and more software in order to build a coordinated plant automation and control system. The added layers of interfaces contribute to lower reliability, increased production downtime and potentially higher costs.
More information in the entire article: The Missing ‘Industry 4.0/Digitalization’ Link – Open Programming Standard Conformance & Certification
Digital Manufacturing Transformation Consultant - Manufacturers are at a pivotal tipping point requiring Digital Manufacturing Transformation to succeed and prosper or become non-competitive.
4yMichael Marullo Customer First! Jeff Bezos puts it well, "True Customer Obsession - There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 (continuing success). " In many ways traditional industrial automation suppliers are trapped in the, “Innovators Dilemma”. The concepts of ‘open’ and ‘portability’ drive against the current business models of traditional automation vendors, since it would significantly devalue their hardware and software investments. The same dynamics led to bad strategy and demise of several mainframe computer & minicomputer companies. Strategically, I suggest industrial automation suppliers need to reevaluate their unique value-add in this new environment, in order to remake their business. A similar example can be observed in the transition from pneumatic controls to direct digital control. Users today have become significantly more sophisticated, technologically, and with greater cooperation with IT people are starting to do the categorizing themselves asking: “Which automation vendors are innovators, early adopters, late majority and laggards?” This categorization is an important consideration for those in industrial automation, because it determines if their automaton systems will continue to be effective and, more importantly, competitive. The computer industry has proven, many times over, that no single vendor can provide as strong a solution as an ecosystem of suppliers, empowered by open architectures. Business model changes enabled by new technology apply to vendors as well as users....
Principal Consultant at automation Insights
4yThe benefits of this ‘open’ approach are clear and ubiquitous— for users. But this begs the question, “What’s in it for suppliers?” Suppliers lost their their competitive advantage with hardware decades ago as a substantial of their hardware offerings became commoditized COTS products. At the time, most figured, Okay, we’ll use our softare
Co-Founder at UWA Industry 4.0 Energy & Resources Digital Interoperability (ERDi) Test Lab, MD ETP Pty Ltd, MD MI Pty Ltd
4y💯