Shaping the industrial landscape

By 2020, cisco anticipates there will be a 50 billion connected devices. While at first this figure might seem pretty staggering, have a think about the number of connected devices in your household today compared with, say, 10 years ago. While a decade ago you might have had just one desktop PC, nowadays it's not uncommon for each person in a household to have a smartphone, a laptop and a tablet each. Suddenly that figure doesn't seem quite so distant.

This was a message outlined by cisco's Paul Taylor. Responsible for the strategic alliance between cisco and Rockwell, Taylor outlined the three main trends identified by cisco as shaping the global industrial landscape: Changing basic world economics, with a move towards emerging economies in terms of spend and returns; Increasing energy demands; and Changing social demographics, resulting in an imbalanced, often ageing, workforce. 

Against this backdrop, Taylor went on to expand on the part industry will play in a future world where everything is connected to everything – people, processes, information and devices – or in other worlds, the Internet of Everything. Once the scenario is moved into the factory environment, with devices such as sensors, PLCs, drives and motors all being connected, it is clear that this area will account for a sizeable proportion of the anticipated 50 billion connected devices. 

In fact, cisco calculates the potential value of the Internet of Everything to be around $19 trillion, the majority of which will be in manufacturing.

And with this networked business model comes the challenge of developing an infrastructure to get data from connected devices, pull it together and run it though various applications so it can be used in a beneficial way. With this big data, there is the potential to learn from machines in not just one factory, but in multiple sites, worldwide, perhaps across whole vertical sectors, or even industry as a whole.

Another important aspect of the Internet of Everything is the convergence of IT (information technology) and OT (operational technology) and the challenges this brings. In general, the interests of IT and OT are opposing: manufacturing is interested in uptime and availability, while for the IT world confidentiality is more important. However security is important to all parties and a major concern is how to stop a network being compromised and controlled by a malicious outside party. 

Addressing these issues and more, cisco and Rockwell Automation have developed a joint architecture for connecting IT and OT: CPWE (converged plant wide Ethernet). As the architecture has been developed, so has Rockwell's range of Stratix products.

At the event Dominic Molloy, Rockwell director of marketing for the European Region, asserted that those companies wanting to take advantage of emerging economies and uptake in global spend must have a manufacturing environment that is lean, sustainable, secure and profitable, something made possible by taking advantage of the new developments in manufacturing technology. Indeed, according to Molloy, $1 trillion will be needed to drive productivity to meet global growing demand. This represents a great opportunity, but only for those companies prepared to invest and compete in a global environment, said Molloy.

The ability to connect devices has opened up a complete new era for the manufacturing environment and is changing the way factories are developed. Rockwell's focus is on the Industrial Internet of Things, which it brings to life through The Connected Enterprise. This is about how to optimise the manufacturing supply chain for rapid value creation; driving productivity through the manufacturing environment, driving sustainability in a safe and secure way, and manufacturing agility. Enabling this, information about a business' assets, products and process is more readily available than ever before. 

Molloy anticipates an 'inflection point' in manufacturing where many companies have invested in ERP and capitalised on the gains possible from this, but a lot of the information needed to drive productivity further, to reduce costs and provide a safer, more secure and sustainable work environment will be gained by investing in the manufacturing and automation system. 

When it comes to enabling The Connected Enterprise, Molloy identified smart devices, cloud, mobility, scalable computing and analytics, and security as important drivers that need to be implemented in order to take advantage of the opportunities presented. And with only around 14% of US manufacturers currently having machines connected to an enterprise network, the potential is huge.