The journey to SMART Manufacturing
As operations move to ‘smart’ manufacturing, everyone from operators and technicians to corporate executives are using smart capabilities to gain new efficiencies, improve product quality and make operations more responsive.
Introduction
Industrial operators are modernising aspects of their processes and plants, converging Information Technology (IT) and Operations Technology (OT) functions to be more productive in an increasingly competitive global environment. Together, NHP and Rockwell Automation achieve this through The Connected Enterprise.
As a result, operations are becoming faster, more innovative and more reliant on integrated machinery and equipment to increase throughput and production flexibility. While working to enable The Connected Enterprise and with downtime costs on the rise, manufacturers have to figure out how to get the most out of their ageing infrastructure. They are challenged with finding support for ongoing maintenance needs, greater complexity in spare parts management and an increased risk of losing vital expertise.
Working with NHP and Rockwell Automation will help you stay ahead of maintenance issues, so you can minimise the risk of downtime as you modernise.
Why the time to modernise is now
As technology continues to drive innovation, staying competitive requires you to drive increased performance from your automation systems. Enabling the convergence of IT and OT into a single, unified architecture ultimately means faster time to market, greater flexibility, more informed business decisions and reduced risk across the entire enterprise.
Legacy systems operate in isolation and outdated equipment is costly to run. Justifying the risk and expenses of modernising control systems can be a challenge, while the threat of obsolescence may seem less daunting than modernising – but the benefits of modernising outweigh the risk.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you want to extract more data from your operations?
- Do you need to cut operating costs?
- Could aging or obsolete technology be impacting your productivity and escalating risk?
- Is your automation system truly optimised?
NHP and Rockwell Automation can help you confront the headwinds you’re facing, allow you to you to leverage contemporary technologies to optimise your processes and equip your employees for greater performance and efficiency
The journey to SMART Manufacturing does not have to be overwhelming. Through our Connected Enterprise vision, you can successfully manage incremental change and realise near-term benefits. NHP and Rockwell Automation understand exactly what succeeding in this journey looks like because we’ve done it ourselves, so we can help you develop your roadmap and then help you achieve it.
More than $300M in lost productivity due to unscheduled downtime in Australia and New Zealand every year
Evaluate
To be successful with any modernisation plan, you must first understand where you’re starting from. That means taking stock of every part of your operation – your people, your processes and the technologies you use all play a part.
This stage is all about understanding your current state – what makes up your operation and where your risks lie. It’s a process of identifying what opportunities you are missing and what technology-driven functionality you’re not realising because your current operations simply can’t support it.
In considering your modernisation plan, there are a few key pieces to the puzzle that may not be immediately obvious when it comes to your workforce, so it’s important to think broadly about your operations and your employees’ daily activities and ask questions such as:
- Do you have workforce limitations such as a shortage of skilled workers to run your current equipment?
- Are you struggling to meet regulatory compliance requirements?
- Are you suffering from excess downtime due to equipment failures and maintenance shutdowns?
- Are you getting the most out of the data locked away in your systems? Or maybe you have an abundance of data, but no means to act on it.
- Maybe your network isn’t robust enough to meet increasing communication and security challenges.
- The answers to questions such as these should be factored in as you develop your Modernisation plan.
How do you do it?
- Information infrastructure (hardware and software)
- Controls and devices (sensors, actuators, motor controls, switches, etc.) that feed and receive data
- Networks that move all of this information
- Security policies (understanding, organisation, enforcement)
- Particularly critical is an examination of the people and processes that manage this framework.
Rockwell Automation® provides a full suite of services to help you understand your lifecycle management requirements and develop a plan to address them.
- Training Assessments help you establish a benchmark for the knowledge levels of your workforce.
- Lockout/tagout Audits, Arc Flash Analysis and Scalable Safety Assessments provide a comprehensive approach to help improve the safety of employees working with machines and energised electrical equipment.
- Installed Base Evaluation™ (IBE) is an on-site collection and consulting service that pinpoints automation obsolescence risk by enterprise, facility, line, machine, panel and identifies MRO inventory risks and optimisation opportunities.
- Network and Security Assessments fully assess your industrial IT assets and identify and remediate potential performance and security issues.
Assessing your legacy equipment
If you’re not able to modernise all at once, consider an inventory of your legacy equipment and your degree of obsolescence risk. A comprehensive hardware or software evaluation will assess product maturity and can help you create a modernisation plan. Attempting to do this in-house can be a time-consuming, laborious process. Services available through outside consultants, such as the Rockwell Automation Installed Base Evaluation™ (IBE), can help ease this process. The results of the evaluation include:
- Identifying your most critical assets to facilitate investment decisions
- Reducing obsolescence risks
- Roadmapping efficient corporate storeroom and spare parts initiatives
- Verifying all assets have up-to-date bills of material
These evaluations gather essential data for creating a strategic maintenance plan and can act as a roadmap for migration or modernisation plans.
While migration involves a one-for-one upgrade of older equipment for newer models and can help mitigate the risk of obsolescence, modernisation can add additional value by taking advantage of technology to further improve operations.
Plan
In developing your modernisation wroadmap, there are a few key items to consider and document:
- Goals – what are you trying to achieve?
- Scope – what is the extent of the modernisation project?
- Budget – what funding is available
and how will it be allocated? - Schedule/timing – what is the expected timeline?
- Resources (personnel etc) – who will complete the project and what equipment will be required?
NHP and Rockwell Automation have the tools, services and expertise to help you design a modernisation plan.
- On-site engineering – preventive maintenance contracts are available to support legacy products, while embedded lifecycle engineers can also be contracted to develop a modernisation roadmap and execute migration services under contract
- Inventory services including storeroom management, parts management agreements and MRO inventory management
- Training services including on-site training, open enrolment and virtual classroom support, as well as specific certification curriculum
- Product lifecycle status tool, which can help you determine the lifecycle of your existing equipment and identify the most contemporary Allen-Bradley products, bringing you advancements in performance, flexibility and security
- Integrated architecture builder, a graphical, user-friendly application that allows you to automatically define and configure a contemporary control and information architecture including a detailed bill of materials based on legacy control systems.
Execute
NHP and Rockwell Automation use a well-defined process in our approach to lifecycle management, which includes using industry standard hardware and software interfaces, modular design practices and a focus on compatibility between product revisions wherever possible.
Custom solutions
Rockwell Automation’s modernisation services and support are available to help you realise the benefits of a modern automation control system. Their factory-trained Field Service Professionals are experienced and prepared to provide on-site assessments, migration planning services, start-up and commissioning.
From project management to start-up, we will help define and implement an effective modernisation strategy for your facility that goes beyond simply addressing your legacy equipment to truly optimising your operation.
Migration packages
For less complex upgrades, an easy, affordable option is Rockwell Automation’s packaged migration in which NHP helps migrate your end of life or discontinued system using recommended replacement products. This migration package may include everything needed to complete a successful migration, as well as one full year of 24/7 support.
Do-It-Yourself
If you prefer to migrate without assistance, Rockwell Automation provides a number of tools, free-of-charge, to help you plan and migrate with as little disruption as possible.
What to consider
- Who will help you implement your modernisation plan?
Do you have the expertise in-house or do you need to partner with experts to help ease the transition? - Incremental/phased or ‘rip & replace’?
Will you take on the modernisation effort all at once, or do you need to schedule it in phases to accommodate your budget and timeline? - Machine-by-machine, line-by-line, plant-by-plant or whole enterprise?}Will you start with one machine or are you ready to tackle your entire operation?
Modernisation and sustainability
In addition to the commercial benefits outlined in this paper, there is a significant nexus between Modernisation and improved environmental outcomes.
Modernisation promotes energy efficiency, which will be crucial for industry to play
its part in helping Australia and New Zealand to achieve targets laid out in the Paris Agreement.
Modernisation also leads to a more sustainable use of natural resources and less industrial waste, while the leaner processes and longer life cycles of machinery and equipment will reduce landfill. These outcomes are all achievable by modernising technology against the potential introduction or changes to carbon pricing mechanisms and other environmental levers.
With Rockwell Automation hardware, NHP encourages customers to utilise the StepForward program which offers credit incentives to upgrade legacy products with the latest hardware available. In this program, the existing legacy product is traded-in for the new product. Once the legacy hardware is received by Rockwell Automation, it is sent to a partner company for ethical recycling which diverts up to 100% of the product by weight from landfill. The product is carefully disassembled and precious metals are reclaimed for reuse.
How can NHP help?
The NHP Service Team has an extensive infrastructure including Repair Centres, Test Rooms, Field Service Technicians, Application Engineers and a team of Project Coordinators. We pride ourselves on excellence in customer support and are committed to looking after our customers for the life of their project and beyond.
Our team of service technicians hold tertiary and/or trade qualifications and regularly participate in supply line partner training programs to ensure our services are completed in line with manufacturer specifications. Equipped with comprehensive product knowledge, our technicians are committed to delivering best practice electrical services, while providing an exceptional customer experience.
NHP offers an extensive range of service solutions to suit a wide range of needs. Whether your need is for installation and commissioning, migration, emergency breakdown or lifecycle services, NHP has a national network of technicians throughout Australia and New Zealand in order to quickly respond to your needs.
Here are some of the services NHP can offer:
- Preventative maintenance
- Commissioning and start-up
- Modernisation – retrofits and upgrades
- Emergency breakdown assistance
- Site assessments and reliability evaluations
- Testing (verification/ acceptance testing and compliance with design)
- Training to support our products
Why Choose NHP?
No matter how good a product may be, it is nothing without dedicated people to support that product. NHP is solely committed to servicing the needs of our customers. We bring together internationally recognised power distribution and protection products with local knowledge and expertise to deliver best practice services from concept design through to installation and after-sales service, including project management.
With more than 50 years of experience in the electrical and engineering industry, our specialist teams work collaboratively to design and deliver solutions to maximise the success of your project.
When it comes to finding a local partner with a global network for your next project, choosing NHP will unlock a world of expertise, knowledge and experience across electrical and automation products, systems and solutions.
Summary
Once your assets – whether specific devices or whole applications or equipment sets – have either been migrated or modernised and the proper inventory management program is in place, you need to ensure your operations are maintaining optimum productivity. An important way to monitor this is by evaluating asset performance and reliability.
Asset monitoring systems can collect information from your assets and make it globally available across your organisation. Reliability consultants can help you assess the reliability of assets which enables you to drive proactive maintenance to help reduce risk and maximise productivity.
NHP and Rockwell Automation can help define and implement an effective modernisation strategy for your organisation, helping to realise the vision of The Connected Enterprise, which will yield improvements in both data and decision making. Relevant, actionable data enables more informed business decisions, tied to key performance indicators, delivering your business:
- Actionable information
- Increased overall equipment effectiveness
- Increased safety
- Increased security
In the end, partnering with NHP and Rockwell Automation offers you a more thorough understanding of your known and quantifiable obsolescence risks and lessens the chance of unplanned downtime due to unexpected or emergency migrations, as well as hidden obsolescence risks.
To discuss the best way to modernise your operation, please contact your local NHP Account Representative, or contact us at 0800 NHP NHP sales@nhp-nz.com
