It’s the age-old conundrum that keeps plant managers up at night. Tossing and turning, they agonize: “Is it time for our company to upgrade to new technology? Or are our current systems good enough? What are our competitors doing with technology?”
Moving to new technology is no small decision. As plant managers know all too well, replacing systems is difficult, costly, time-consuming, disruptive, and risky – not to mention stressful. It doesn’t always start off this way, but once the transition process is underway, manufacturers feel the burden of disruption and downtime from installation and training and the grim reality of the learning curve. Plus, too many new systems never meet their intended objectives.
Even deciding where to begin replacing systems is challenging. Upgrading entire plants is extremely costly and is not realistic for many manufacturers. Production lines simply cannot go down because production = revenue. Managers are forced into choosing which systems to upgrade and which legacy systems to maintain.
Because of the risks outlined above, plant managers have had to build Rube Goldberg-like and tenuously connected systems patched together over years of operations. These systems rarely share data with each other, and even worse, they often do not provide the right real-time data to the right people at the right time. The result? Bad decisions, finger-pointing and running in place. Faced with a need to change, plant managers often see the safest path as additional Frankenstein-like fixes. The concerns about compatibility in such a predicament are more than valid; they reflect a true fear of modernization.
However, given how fast manufacturing technology is evolving, when even new hardware systems will be out of date in a year or two, standing still means falling behind every day. The last thing a manager wants to see is a plant floor glistening with one-year-old technology that pales in performance to the latest and greatest innovation. What is worse is when the new technology is not easy for line technicians to use. When it isn’t, they resort to manual workarounds (e.g., spreadsheets and whiteboards), defeating the purpose of the new technology.
So, what are plant managers to do?
It comes down to a few fundamental questions and a necessary change in mindset. For decades, plant managers have struggled with being tethered to legacy systems, given the large past investments in these, while also fearing the costs, risks, and compatibility issues that could come with integrating new technology.
I maintain that this situation is avoidable.
What if this “tradeoff” between old and new technology no longer existed? What if the pain points of sunk costs, expensive upgrades, and compatibility were no longer concerns? What if there were a way to bring old and new technology together in a way that optimized performance, standardization, and efficiency?
In two words: the cloud. Cloud software is revolutionizing how plant systems communicate and share data, regardless of how old or how new the hardware is. Cloud technology is the bridge to unifying a single plant or a network of plants, allowing multiple systems to communicate in the same language – providing manufacturers with the elusive common plant floor standard. Entire control systems on the plant floor that regulate equipment and monitor production metrics can capture and analyze data from diverse sources and share this valuable information across networks. The end result is increased standardization, which brings greater efficiency and an improved bottom line.
While some have questioned the security of the cloud, within the past decade, great improvements have been made to increase data protection. The cloud is as secure as other methods of data storage, if not more so, and continues to rapidly improve as providers learn about and respond to security threats. Cloud technology providers depend on their security measures for continued business, and to these companies, having impenetrable security walls is a top priority. After all, providers such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have seen their year-over-year double-digit growth continue to accelerate because they provide end users with best-in-class security. In the cloud, Yokoten principles are fundamental because any security abnormality that occurs is quickly shared among providers. That can’t happen with internally created plant systems.
Most important, cloud technology can meet a company’s existing technology where it is today and evolve with it over time. With the cloud, it’s less about questioning whether hardware will still be relevant in the next year, because cloud software will adapt and continue measuring everything that happens on the plant floor. As it does, there will be continuous improvement. Cloud technology gets better and stronger over time, and that helps enable continued improvement of plant maintenance, operations and production.
Bob Argyle is chief customer officer at Leading2Lean, a Wellington, NV-based provider of cloud solutions for manufacturers and other industrial organizations seeking to implement lean culture.
Don’t fear the cloud. It’s here; it’s growing; and it offers tangible benefits to manufacturers, just as it has to other verticals. Let’s talk about data. Remember the old adage of “garbage in, garbage out”? Many plant managers know that the data they are currently seeing is faulty (a.k.a. “garbage”). The problem is that by the time data gets to plant managers, it’s no longer timely. They are looking at aged data that had to be extracted by IT teams.
Consider this analogy: You can’t win a game if no one’s keeping score along the way. Cloud software gives managers complete access to real-time data that is transparent and drives accountability. With robust information, managers and line technicians can make accurate decisions and continuously improve operations while in the task. Data is worthless unless it is the right data delivered to the right people at the right time.
At the end of the day, managers strive for a plant floor that harnesses the power of technology to maximize performance for every second of operation. To achieve this, change and adaptation are inevitable and are integral to any plant’s competitiveness. It’s not about changing just for the sake of change; it’s about identifying technology that will continually improve plant-floor performance.
With the cloud, plant managers have the opportunity to unite old and new technologies seamlessly to leverage shared data without having to replace existing systems. It’s a whole new way of gathering, integrating and leveraging information across all plant operations functions, including production, quality and maintenance. With the cloud, the plant floor will never be the same – it will be much better.