Mitsubishi’s e-F@ctory guru urgently calls for factory automation standards to give senior executives better shop floor transparency.
There’s a connectedness about Germany’s Ruhr Valley that is unlike almost anywhere else in Europe.
Historically the nation’s industrial heartland, the region was a furnace of traditional mining, iron, steel, and heavy industries for well more than 100 years. More recently, the major cities of Duisburg, Bochum, Essen, and Dortmund have grown together to form a vast, interconnected, sprawling metropolis between the Ruhr, Rhine, and Lippe rivers that now ranks as Europe’s largest industrial region and the fourth-largest urban area after Moscow, London, and Paris.
Today, many of the old, industrial smokestack landmarks have been reinvented as cultural venues — Essen is even one of Europe’s Capitals of Culture in 2010 — while the Ruhr’s economic livelihood has been transformed by an influx of high-tech and cleaner service industries.
When I flew into Dortmund recently to meet one of Mitsubishi Electric Automation’s manufacturing gurus on his recent whirlwind tour of Europe, it was technological, rather than urban, connectivity that was high on the agenda.
“If we don’t have strong standards for connecting and transferring messages between the shop floor, MES, and IT systems, we won’t reach that dream world of virtual design, development, and production planning for the future,” said Yuji Watanabe, creator of Mitsubishi’s e-F@ctory concept and now vice president of R&D in business systems and new technology at Mitsubishi’s main factory automation manufacturing unit in Nagoya, Japan. Mitsubishi’s e-F@ctory concept offers a way to connect control systems with business systems.
Watanabe would like to see an urgent initiative to create extensive global automation standards for manufacturing that will let IT and MES systems gather and consolidate real-time information directly from the shop floor in an integrated and unified way. This will help manufacturers create more transparent, real-time information flows that will make each factory process faster and maintenance data more valuable and predictive, and feed into the new wave of PLM, factory, and process simulation technologies that are becoming increasingly important in creating and running tomorrow’s agile factories.
For Watanabe, it’s a three-stage process: gathering shop floor data, consolidating that into useful IT information, and using that information to drive executive strategy. You can’t do the critical strategic step effectively without them all.
“Today, most shop floor data is still collected as final results only after the production process is over, so there’s no way of knowing the current status of the production line,” he said. “The problem gets worse because many factories have too many gateway computers each linking diverse shop floor machines to the MES. We need standard data and messaging formats across shop floor automation systems so we can deliver all essential data to the MES swiftly and in real time.”
He believes the need for these automation standards is now urgent. In a severe recession, companies need all the information they can get. In many ways, he said, it’s the globalisation of the Japanese concept of Kaizen — continuous small improvements. Link them together and you have a transformation.
“Information is power, and every little bit of information you can get from the plant floor makes the business more powerful,” he said. “To improve overall efficiency, you need to improve many different aspects in many small ways.”
