In this special report, ARC Advisory Group analysts discuss the top technologies they are currently following for manufacturing, infrastructure, and other industrial applications.
Top Technologies for 2013
By Paul Miller and ARC AnalystsKeywords
Internet of Things, Analytics, Big Data, Simulation, Cloud Computing, Vir-tualization, Mobility, Wearable Technologies, BYOD, Remote Operations Management, Additive Manufacturing/3D Printing, Cyber Security
Overview
ARC Advisory Group analysts track a broad range of emerging technolo-gies related to manufacturing, infrastructure, industrial automation and IT, and enterprise applications. This special ARC report highlights selected technologies that we believe will have significant impact over the next several years, if not well into the future.
Clearly, many of the hottest technology trends to-day represent a convergence of largely internet- and IT-based enabling technologies. ARC believes that this convergence is likely to remove many existing constraints to help transform the way man-ufacturers and other industrial enterprises operate and collaborate, both internally and across their extended value chains…and do so to a degree that we have not witnessed in recent decades.
While far from a comprehensive list, we feel the following hot technologies provide a good “feel” for the overall landscape:
• Intelligent devices and the Internet of Things
• Predictive analytics for Big Data
• Cloud computing and services-based solutions
• Virtualization
• 3D simulation and augmented reality
• Mobility-enabled applications and “wearable” technologies
• BYOD
Proliferation of Intelligent Devices and the Emerging Internet of Things
As microprocessors and other electronics become increasingly smaller, more efficient, and less expensive, we're seeing intelligence being embed-ded into more and more consumer, commercial, and industrial devices. Increasingly, these devices communicate with each other via the emerging "Internet of Things" (IoT). This brings what the industry previously re-ferred to as machine-to-machine (M2M) communications to a whole new level.
In his keynote address at ARC’s recent World Industry Forum in Orlando, ARC President Andy Chatha explained that the era of connected devices is already upon us. In 2012, there were more than ten billion Wi-Fi-connected devices, with projections for more than 50 billion devices to be connected by 2020. This will include more than five billion smartphone and internet users, most cars, and many home appliances. Free or inexpensive mobile platforms will dominate the market. Andy believes that, ultimately, these connected devices will help create a smarter, more sustainable world. Intelligent devices and IoT have broad ramifications for industry, particu-larly for asset management, process management, remote operations management, safety and security, and supply chain applications.
According to ARC Vice President Chantal Polsonetti, the concept of an In-ternet of Things has morphed from its origins in RFID to one that encompasses all networked devices, both within and external to a manu-facturing operation. Along with intelligent sensors and machines, IoT encompasses cloud computing, analytics, Big Data, mobility, and universal visualization. The primary value propositions of improved business per-formance, production efficiency, and asset optimization remain the core objectives for implementing this enabling technology.
In a manufacturing context, these objectives are achieved through the abil-ity to gather data locally from the myriad of sensors, devices, machines, and other entities operating on the plant floor. This data are then made available globally via a cloud or similar infrastructure platform to all sanc-tioned parties for use in analytics, optimization, and a variety of other applications.
Andy Chatha
Chantal Polsonetti
Chantal believes that the push to adopt an Internet of Things in manufac-turing coincides with a concurrent enabling trend toward use of industrial Ethernet and wireless network technologies within the production envi-ronment. These technologies not only offer incremental benefit over dedicated automation solutions in many applications, they also favorably
position manufacturers to support the data transfer requirements inherent in IoT.
For plant asset management, Senior Analyst Paula Hollywood believes that field instrumentation and analytical chemistry-based device suppliers have made tremendous progress over the last decade in incorporating value-added functionality into intelligent devices. This includes enhanced visu-alization and health monitoring functionality to facilitate predictive maintenance (PdM). However, despite these technological advancements, many manufacturers are not utilizing digital device diagnostics to their best advantage.
To address this issue, the International Society on Automation (ISA) recent-ly formed a new standard committee, ISA108, to characterize intelligent device management in the process industries. The committee will define standard templates for best practices and work processes based on infor-mation derived from intelligent field devices. These will include models and terminology, implementation guidelines, and detailed work processes. Vice President Dave Woll believes that once finalized, ISA 108 will provide best practices that enable industrial organizations to extract maximum val-ue from their intelligent devices.
Predictive Analytics: Gaining Value from Big Data
According to Vice President Sid Snitkin, interest in analytics and business intelligence (BI) software has surged over the last few years. Leading soft-ware providers offer full analytics suites for enterprises to use to monitor, analyze, and manage a wide range of business activities. But while many industrial enterprises already use business analytics packages, their suc-cesses are primarily in customer-facing activities like sales, marketing, and product development. As a result, many question the applicability of us-ing analytics to improve other critical, but more inward-facus-ing industrial processes like operations and asset management.
Paula Hollywood
Dave Woll
Industrial enterprises collect enormous quantities of information, or “Big Data,” about their facilities, their industrial processes, and the products they produce. They also generate huge volumes of information to manage their extensive supply chains and the many large, complex projects they execute on a continuing basis. Unfortunately, most of this information re-mains buried in process historians and other software applications. Andy, Sid, and others at ARC believe that smart organizations will want to im-plement predictive analytics and associated visualization technologies to better understand the factors that impact performance and identify the practices that can move them forward in their quest for operational excel-lence.
ARC Service Director Steve Banker agrees that embedded analytics (along with other technologies) will play an important role in improving applica-tion usability and providing increased value to end users.
Principal Consultant Janice Abel adds that analytics can help batch manu-facturers (specialty chemicals, food, pharmaceuticals, biotech, etc.) utilize data they are already collecting to make real-time decisions and take ap-propriate actions. Real-time batch analytics can help companies gain better understanding of their processes, minimize variations, and focus on key areas for improvement.
Cloud Computing and Services-Based Solutions
According to Senior Analyst Harry Forbes, the technology disruption that cloud computing represents centers on information technology (IT), rather than operational technology (OT). Cloud represents a new model for IT, challenging an organization’s established IT practices in every area; new platforms, new services, new deployment, licensing, and support models. Cloud forces an IT organization to examine each application within its portfolio and reevaluate the way the application is currently deployed and supported.
From a business standpoint the cloud model offers several potential ad-vantages over the traditional IT service model, including rapid deployment, elasticity, reduced capital investment, and increased access and mobility across a global enterprise.
Steve Banker
Harry Forbes Janice Abel
Senior Consultant Peter Reynolds adds that cloud computing allows users in manufacturing and other industrial plants to get started quickly and then scale up as demand changes. It reduces IT management and server administration tasks, provides organizations with a high-availability archi-tecture, and enables collaboration by increasing accessibility to knowledge and visibility across the enterprise. The Cloud addresses key user pain points, including IT costs, version control, patch management, and applica-tion monitoring. It can also help cultivate faster adopapplica-tion of new products and technologies.
Virtualization
As Principal Analyst Barry Young explained in a recent Insight, virtualiza-tion, a computing approach that decouples hardware and software, is rap-idly gaining traction in the traditionally conservative automation and control industry. While initially met with skepticism for industrial applica-tions, this is no longer this case as end user demands to reduce costs and make more efficient use of computing resources drive suppliers to incorpo-rate the technology.
Today, most major automation suppliers support virtualization in one form or another, predominantly for PC and/or server virtualization. With virtu-alization, a single computer can host multiple instances of the same or different software applications as if each was running in its own dedicated computer — regardless of the specific operating systems employed. In this manner, much of the hardware simply goes away, offering significant bene-fits over the lifecycle of an automation system.
ARC Vice President Craig Resnick adds that virtualization also lowers cost of ownership, empowers disaster recovery for critical production process-es, and reduces hardware failures due to its high-availability architecture. System deployment and disaster recovery leverages virtualization technol-ogy to quickly get systems back up and running when computers fail. 3D Simulation, Augmented Reality, and NUI
According to Senior Analyst Dick Slansky, an increasing number of com-panies in the energy and process industries use 3D virtual simulation and visualization tools to help address some of the many challenges they face. Peter Reynolds
Barry Young
very comprehensive and accurate virtual environments that represent the complete physical plant/facility. These are used to help to plan operation-al procedures, train operators and maintenance technicians, and meet health and safety requirements; all within a computer-simulated 3D envi-ronment. Increasingly, planners also take advantage of this advanced technology to improve their scheduling activities.
Janice Abel adds that high-fidelity operator training simulation software is designed to exactly replicate the specific plant or process, creating an inter-active environment in 2D or 3D. The simulator uses a first principle or em-pirical model of the specific plant and/or process. Laser scanning technologies are often employed to provide the realistic, three-dimensional view of the plant. The training can take place either on the plant’s actual control system, or on an off-line personal computer or tablet that incorpo-rate an image of the actual control system running.
3D immersive technology incorporates dynamic, high-fidelity simulations of the plant, process, and control system with an enhanced interface, similar to 3D gaming technology that provides a highly realistic, immersive envi-ronment for the trainee, including dynamic avatars that can insert the trainee into the simulated plant environment.
Research Director Ralph Rio believes that 3D gaming technology will find increasing adoption in industrial applications and that a new class of appli-cations will emerge that will employ a natural user interface (NUI). According to Ralph when combined with stereoscopic 3D (S3D), the NUI will create the next disruption in the user interface market.
Mobility and “Wearable” Technologies
Ralph also believes that new technologies often provide the key enabler for process re-engineering and business process optimization that can signifi-cantly enhances performance. For maintenance, mobility can provide major improvements in its primary objectives: uptime, asset longevity, safety, and cost control.
The vast majority of maintenance personnel – technicians, supervisors, and stock keepers – are mobile during their typical work routines. Mobile de-vices and the associated software applications offer improvements in the Dick Slansky
associated work flow and business processes. They also improve data in-tegrity by eliminating paper forms and the delays for manual data entry.
Senior Analyst Tim Shea and others at ARC believe that wearable technol-ogies represent an important emerging mobility-enhancing technology trend. Tim believes that wearable technologies, such as the mobile voice and video system already offered by at least one major automation suppli-er, could enable a technician to capture and transmit live video of the devices he or she is working on to experts at a distance to be able to get re-al-time feedback about the correct procedures and actions to carry out. Wearable technologies support the move toward a “hands free” computing and communications platform that can save companies time and cost and increase productivity.
BYOD
The trend toward BYOD (“bring your own device”) — driven by the to-day’s profusion of commercial smartphones, tablets, and other handheld computing devices — is another enabler for mobility in industry. Increas-ingly, plant personnel at all levels prefer to use their own familiar handheld devices while on the job.
Harry Forbes explains that, in many process industries, field devices must be certified to operate in hazardous locations, a requirement that excludes consumer devices from consideration. For industrial service, smartphones, tablets, and other mobility devices require enhanced ruggedness, hazard-ous location certification, and — in some cases — dedicated higher performing interfaces for barcode scanning or other job-specific capabilities. While ubiquitous connectivity and technological convergence have enabled the BYOD trend, it has been constrained by the limited capability of enter-prises to manage the more complex demands represented by mobile consumer devices operating within the enterprise. Harry believes that in-dustrial organizations will have no choice but to overcome these management issues, since – like it or not – BYOD is here to stay.
Remote Operations Management
According to Dave Woll, in the past, the focus on operating remote indus-trial facilities had been to maintain steady-state operations despite frequent disturbances, with operators doing whatever was required to keep the facil-ities running and meet production schedules in a safe and environmentally acceptable way. Although some remote facilities still operate in this mode, the next-generation of remote facilities will not. Tighter production specifi-cations and the need to maintain supply reserves, plus more stringent process safety measures, cyber-security standards, and environmental regu-lations further challenge this dynamic environment.
According to Dave, the traditional hierarchical SCADA (supervisory con-trol and data acquisition) systems used to monitor and manage remote operations are evolving into a new generation of more flexible remote op-erations management (ROM) technologies. Emerging technologies, such as FOUNDATION fieldbus for ROM (essentially an extended control LAN), will provide operations staffs with tools that define precisely what is hap-pening, what will happen, and if the current trajectory is leading to an unacceptable result, what needs to change to achieve an acceptable result,
thus providing the opportunity to take corrective action. Additive Manufacturing
According to ARC Analyst Scott Evans, emerging additive manufacturing (3D printing) technology provides product design teams the ability to per-form rapid prototyping to speed product design and reduce costs. Additive manufacturing systems, driven from CAD models, can use a variety of dif-ferent build materials; including metal, polymer, or sand to build prototypes.
Manufacturers are finding tremendous value in additive manufacturing as a prototyping tool since there is no penalty for design complexity or detail, although most prototypes will require post-production finishing. Using the original CAD models, additive manufacturing systems can fabricate either complex or simple prototypes in one process.
Beyond prototyping, ARC Analyst Florian Gueldner believes that 3D print-ing will be the hottest manufacturprint-ing trend over the next five to fifteen years due to significant advantages. Not only does it provide efficiency for producing small batches, unlike conventional “subtractive” machining pro-Florian Gueldner
cesses, as an additive process, 3D printing is extremely resource efficient. 3D printing also provides manufacturers with a practical and cost-effective way to produce (“print”) complicated parts and bring new products from concept to market in far less time than possible with traditional prototyping and manufacturing approaches.
Recommendations
Most of these potentially disruptive technology trends fall within the realm of ARC’s new Information-Driven Manufacturing Model. As ARC Vice President Greg Gorbach explained in a recent report, this model presents today’s industrial organizations with an interesting dilemma: while indus-try tends to be conservative and thus risk-averse and typically slow to adopt new technology, Greg hypothesizes that it could actually be far risk-ier not to implement the new technologies. Why? Because failure to do so could put industrial organizations at a competitive disadvantage versus their peers that do embrace new technologies to be able to implement more agile and effective information-driven manufacturing.
Of course the proverbial “elephant in the room,” in other words, the often-unspoken issue looming over many of these IT-based enabling technologies is cyber-security. Many of the emerging technologies discussed in this re-port involve general-purpose hardware and software, plus increased connectivity via either the public internet or other TCP/IP-based technolo-gies. As a result, more effective cyber-security policies, approaches, and technology are becoming more important than ever to protect the security, availability, determinism, and availability of mission-critical industrial ap-plications.
The problem is that hackers and cyber criminals are becoming increasingly more sophisticated; creating a tremendous challenge for technology suppli-ers, technology ussuppli-ers, standards organizations, and government agencies. ARC believes that all concerned parties will have to remain vigilant and continue to work together closely, both to identify and mitigate emerging threats and to create more secure automation and IT architectures.
For further information or to provide feedback on this Insight, please contact your account manager or the author at [email protected]. ARC Insights are pub-lished and copyrighted by ARC Advisory Group. The information is proprietary to Greg Gorbach
