Fast data helps managers troubleshoot remotely
Rockwell brings factory-automation tools to phones, tablets
The Texas facility that mass-produces State Fair corn dogs and Jimmy Dean Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick retooled itself recently as a hyper-automated smart factory. It installed 1,500 sensors to collect gigabytes of data on everything from raw meat inventories to wastewater and electrical usage.
Then the Fort Worth factory took one extra step into the future of industrial technology: It added software that transmits all of that real-time data onto smartphones and tablets, making it possible for plant managers to monitor their production network from anywhere on the factory floor — and during coffee breaks or vacations, as well.
If they choose — so far, most don’t — this new breed of mobile managers can even operate factory equipment remotely, shutting off pumps or speeding up production lines. Technology has made that sort of operation as easy as playing a smartphone video game, but it can be reckless because a lot of equipment can interfere with or hurt those who are physically present.
It’s only a matter of time, some say, before factory controls migrate to Google Glass, the wearable displays mounted in eyeglass frames, or smart wristwatches.
From the oil industry to the most sprawling auto works and from China to Texas, the emergence of the mobile factory work-
“You can be driving to see some kind of a pump in a station that’s 25 miles away and you get an alert from another station that’s 10 miles away. And so you adjust and see the other pump first. That’s how you can change the way you are working.”
Ellie Holman, spokeswoman for GE’s industrial automation division
er promises to ratchet global competition to new levels.
Jon Riechert, senior engineer for innovation at Tyson Foods Inc., which owns the Fort Worth factory, loves his Samsung Galaxy S5 phone, which runs the new FactoryTalk VantagePoint Mobile application from Rockwell Automation Inc.
Asked what he likes most about the gauges and dials on his phone, Riechert quickly points out that Tyson awards bonuses to those who maintain full output while slashing electrical use or halving the volume of perishable material that’s wasted and thrown out.
“There’s even a friendly competition among machinery operators on who can be the most efficient,” Riechert said, adding that he likes the mobile app’s intuitive navigation features. “There’s full customization on what you want to see.”
An alert is triggered with every dip in peak efficiency — at the Fort Worth plant, that equals a capacity of 120 million pounds of breaded hot dogs or pancake-wrapped sausages-on-a-stick a year.
Previously, a conveyor belt malfunction in packaging could lead to production downtime and losses of perishable food in the fryers. The mobile plant manager, however, can troubleshoot delays instantly from his smartphone and coordinate with all the other factory operations, Riechert said — minimizing or preventing any loss in production.
“The interaction level on the phone is seconds,” said Kyle Reissner, an engineer who leads mobile application development for Rockwell, the $6.6 billion-a-year global technology company based in Milwaukee.
“The question is, how do we make those workers as productive as possible through the supercomputers that are in their pockets,” said Reissner, who helped Rockwell roll out the FactoryTalk VantagePoint app less than a year ago.
The emergence of the mobile manufacturing manager is a relatively new but fastgrowing phenomenon. “Manufacturers are seeing a future where plant walls and fences are irrelevant in knowing and executing on the current operational reality,” says a recent post on Automation.com, an online industrial trade journal.
Putting factory controls into the palm of your hand is an outgrowth of the automation industry’s perpetual quest for greater efficiencies and lower costs, as rivals in China and India are also pursuing the latest generation of smart factories. And as automation advances, it leaves technology laggards behind.
Rockwell chief executive Keith Nosbusch says fewer than 14% of U.S. manufacturers have synced their production equipment into automated networks like those at Tyson.
As a result, competition to bring mobile technology to factories is increasingly fierce. General Electric Co., for instance, released its Proficy Mobile smartphone app for factories last year.
“It’s a productivity enhancement,” said Ellie Holman, spokeswoman for GE’s industrial automation division. “All the alerts will find you.”
Some of the earliest Proficy Mobile adopters were municipal water treatment systems, such as Haverhill, Mass., which produces 2 billion gallons of water a year for 58,000 Haverhill residents and businesses.
Water systems are primed for industrial automation because their sensors monitor quality, pumping, sedimentation, filtration and disinfection, GE said. They also don’t have large teams of staff on hand.
“You can be driving to see some kind of a pump in a station that’s 25 miles away and you get an alert from another station that’s 10 miles away,” Holman said. “And so you adjust and see the other pump first. That’s how you can change the way you are working.”
While competition from cheap-labor nations becomes less important in an automated manufacturing world, the proliferation of technologies such as mobile apps means factory workers need new skill sets, often making it difficult to fill industrial trade jobs.
Echoing a lament heard often in the industrial Midwest, Riechert said Tyson has difficulty finding engineers and technicians.
“We had specifically to look for people with skills in running robotics,” Riechert said. “People with those skills are hard to find. And if you have those skills, it can be pretty lucrative.”
Of all industries, the global oil industry might be the most striking example of what is possible to compress into the interface of a phone. From the remote oil fields to the corner gas station pump and all the pipelines, pumps and refineries in between, the process of extracting crude oil and supplying fuel has staggering scope and scale, noted Gary Pearsons, another Rockwell executive.
But it’s increasingly possible to monitor such a system on a portable touch screen. “What was once paper-based is now an exacting system that creates immediate electronic records, allowing us to achieve new heights in operational intelligence,” Pearsons said.
So far, Rockwell and its global rivals are only scratching the surface of what’s possible with smartphones, said Rockwell spokesman John Bernaden.
“What Tyson is doing is just the beginning,” said Bernaden, who is also vice chairman of the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition Inc. trade group in Washington, D.C.
“We have a lot of stuff in our pipeline,” Reissner said in a phone interview from Cleveland, where Rockwell has the headquarters for its global software development teams. In what Reissner called “rapid release cycles,” Rockwell’s geeks have upgraded their mobile applications every quarter since the rollout in August.
Inside Rockwell, the latest versions of FactoryTalk VantagePoint are developed secretively, for competitive reasons, under the code name “Project: Stanton” — a reference to Stanton Allen, who teamed up with Lynde Bradley in Milwaukee in 1903 to found Allen-Bradley, an industrial controls company that evolved over time into Rockwell.
But Rockwell talks openly about what its systems will
do. No adopters appear willing to operate equipment remotely, such as starting up a conveyor line. “We have a lot of equipment that can hurt people, and someone might have their hand in a dangerous place,” Riechert said.
It’s also technically possible to run FactoryTalk VantagePoint from a golf course or while on vacation. But for now, Tyson’s network security technicians have blocked it from operating anything from beyond the boundaries of the factory’s WiFi radius.
Putting real-time dashboards into the palms of plant managers is a natural progression for Rockwell, which hews to a strategy it calls “the information-enabled connected enterprise,” said Rick Eastman, an analyst who follows the automation industry for Milwaukee investment firm Robert W. Baird & Co.
“The whole trend,” Eastman said, “is toward mobility.”
“We had specifically to look for people with skills in running robotics. People with those skills are hard to find. And if you have those skills, it can be pretty lucrative.”
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Jon Riechert, senior engineer for innovation at Tyson Foods Inc.