Advantage two: People
The second major benefit of combining
IT and OT is to allow staff on both sides to
overcome their differences. Cybersecurity,
decision-making, scalability and downtime
are just some areas that can put IT and OT
staff at odds with each other.
Take downtime, for example. In mission
critical applications such as food and
beverage production, where unexpected
downtime could result in spoiled produce, OT
staff may be responsible for getting the line
back up and running as quickly as possible. IT
staff, on the other hand, may be responsible
for ensuring data integrity for traceability
purposes and will therefore prioritise this
task.
In this situation, a software platform such as
zenon can help IT and OT staff collectively
solve their problems. zenon’s network
technology features seamless and circular
redundancy and high availability, so that
downtime is eliminated. For engineers, it also
offers post-event fault analysis and allows
operators to reload modified functions
without having to restart the system.
Similarly, data archiving allows IT staff to
immediately retrieve and store traceability
data.
Advantage three: Place
Business theory dictates that if you want to
make it difficult for your competitors to enter
your market, you need to put up barriers to
entry. This includes technological, regulatory
or economical hurdles that you’ve spent
years overcoming, and ones that make it
unattractive for new entrants to replicate.
But what if these same hurdles prevent
you growing as a business? This is often
the case in “places” such as sugar refining,
dairy processing, and pharmaceutical
manufacturing. Businesses in these industry
sectors have spent decades developing finely
tuned proprietary processes that are not only
difficult to automate, they’re difficult to scale.
Take sugar refining for example. Because
the harvesting window for sugar cane is
so narrow — typically three months from
December to March — manufacturers
are under pressure to ensure that they
can quickly setup the plant for seasonal
production.
What’s more, the process of turning raw sugar
cane into the processed sugar we’re familiar
with is a complex one. This involves many
steps including shredding, milling, juice
extraction, clarification, evaporation, syrup
production, crystallisation, centrifugation,
drying and packaging.
All these processes need to be carefully co-
ordinated as any downtime can be critical to
the success of the final product. If the refining
process doesn’t align perfectly with the
harvesting window manufacturers may suffer
from perished crops and lost revenue.
Here, the integration of IT and OT is
essential in democratising automation,
levelling the playing field and facilitating
business growth.
To allow customers to achieve this, we’ve
ensured zenon supports open standards
such as OPC UA, as well as being built
with over 300 open interfaces and native
drivers.
The platform runs on common industrial
clients and operating systems and offers
visualisation using standard HTML5 web
technology.
Take advantage now
As the industry breaks down the rigid
barriers of traditional engineering structures,
we’re seeing how powerful digital platforms
can be in underpinning the sustainable
convergence of IT and OT.
The advantages are clear, it’s time for
businesses to act. Maybe in another forty
years, engineers will look back and wonder
why industry was so reluctant to topple the
figurative IT and OT castles.
www.copadata.com
Issue 40 PECM
173