We finally got our wish. Industry 4.0 delivered a wide array of new technologies—sensors, edge devices, mobile devices, and more—that now collect, and sometimes deliver, massive amounts of data from every asset imaginable. However, that leaves a lot of organizations asking, “Was that it? I thought Industry 4.0 was supposed to usher in the next Industrial Revolution. It seems to me that all it brought was a bunch of data I have no time to organize or analyze.”
If that concern sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Fortunately, as Sean Saul shares in his recent article in Control Engineering, the issue of lots of data but little change is just a minor bump in the road. He explains,
“The promise of Industry 4.0 is still ahead. It is the foundation upon which a new evolution of the process industries will meet the changing needs of the next generation of industrial operations. Today’s most forward-thinking manufacturers and automation suppliers are utilizing the concepts and enabling technologies of Industry 4.0 alongside a boundless automation vision to develop a unified, consistent data fabric to eliminate data silos and remove complex and fragile integrations across disparate systems and applications.”
Interconnection is key
Emerson’s Boundless Automation vision is one of unlimited flexibility and data mobility. Imagine flexible application environments that can seamlessly interact and exchange data, making it possible for data from remote field devices to make it all the way to the enterprise, with process context, to drive wide-scope business decisions. It can be done, but not with traditional design strategies. Sean shares,
“Today, however, project-based deployments of hardware and software create silos of data. Production, reliability, safety, and sustainability outcomes are typically driven by solutions managed at the plant level with particular—and often different—technology stacks and data models designed specifically for one department. Extracting, transforming, and landing data for cross-functional use, such as in analytics, becomes a herculean task, one that is manual, time-consuming, and prone to error.”
Designing with a boundless automation vision in mind breaks this paradigm, unlocking flexibility of operation through seamlessly integrated industrial software. Instead of building around the Purdue Model, where every layer of operations is carefully walled off, teams are instead bracing interconnectivity of their systems to generate a seamless data fabric built on software-defined models of automation.
Bringing pieces of tomorrow online today
Not every technology central to a boundless automation vision for operation is available today; however, many critical elements are already available, making it possible for organizations to start building the foundation for their future architecture. Sean offers up some examples:
These are just a few of the new technologies taking advantage of Emerson’s seamless connectivity between products to build a comprehensive data fabric that breaks down silos to help move data freely across the enterprise for consumption by the cross-functional teams who will innovate tomorrow’s most effective operational strategies.
You can learn more, including reading a deeper dive into some more technologies enabling data mobility and born-digital operations in the full article over at Control Engineering. Be sure to check it out!
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