Reduce Operational Costs, Increase Production Capacity, and Improve Safety With Industrial Edge Technologies
From factory floors to oil-drilling platforms, industrial equipment is generating terabytes of data at the edge. Harnessing and analyzing that data in near real-time can prevent costly equipment failures and optimize the scheduling of needed repairs to minimize downtime and deliver greater value. Technology solutions from HPE and integrator CBT make it viable to apply advanced data collection to older existing facilities, not just greenfield projects.
There’s broad general agreement on the value of collecting data at the edge utilizing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors. But retrofitting so-called brownfield facilities and sites has often been a sensitive financial, technology, and security issue, with businesses focused on maximizing investment and reducing outlays for aging equipment.
“IIoT-based machine condition monitoring is more expensive than traditional ‘walk-around,’ human-driven inspections,” says CBT Senior Solutions Manager Preston Johnson. “Building a return-on-investment plan is paramount to justify change. However, with IIoT, we can get a more complete, holistic picture of the asset’s performance and condition, providing more time to plan and schedule mitigating activities. This lowers costs and reduces downtime, allowing for increased production.”
Many manufacturers and processes tend to rely on rule-of-thumb guidelines for maintaining and servicing older machines and devices. Data-driven condition monitoring (CM) and predictive maintenance (PdM) can transform data into real value. Integrating asset condition data with maintenance and operations data provides a holistic analytic view for predicting maintenance needs, operational anomalies, and business outcomes.
Architecting Industrial Edge Solutions
Harnessing sensors and connected devices at the edge for CM and PdM optimizes return on investment (ROI) in manufacturing and industrial process applications, by preventing costly breakdowns, minimizing downtime, and improving overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). IIoT technology can also increase automation at the edge and add intelligence to streams of data.
CBT is a Domain Expert Integrator specializing in IT/OT convergence and IoT solution design. Building on CM/PdM practices and drawing on an expert partner ecosystem, CBT integration engineering leverages industry-leading technologies — including edge data management and remote monitoring systems from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) — to create open architecture solutions that support technology investments of today and tomorrow.
CBt utilizes a proven solution development methodology called innovation delivery as a service (IDaaS) to help clients design a CM/PdM road map and a future-state vision that continually yields business benefits. IDaaS engagements begin with a Quickstart, a design-thinking ideation session used to make fast progress on complex needs. CM/PdM Quickstarts identify key solution design information, including:
- Plant assets, including functional plant location, asset value, likely failure modes, and maintenance history
- Current routine maintenance programs
- Maximum or expected plant production capacity
- Current maintenance spend for a plant
CM and PdM are core to identifying asset problems before they occur and allowing for repair at an optimized point in time. PdM provides time to plan for correction well in advance of functional failure, enabling operators to optimize downtime and resources as they maximize uptime and production.
Converged Edge Systems
HPE has created unique purpose-built systems for converging real-time data acquisition, enterprise-class computing, and remote manageability that help power CM/PdM solutions. HPE Edgeline systems are energy-efficient, ruggedized platforms with a broad range of network connectivity and data acquisition options to accommodate even the most complex industrial applications and use cases.
Providing data-center-level compute power, HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems can aggregate and process data, produce real-time insights, and perform deep analytics. HPE Aruba controllers and switches provide IIoT remote monitoring solutions, from physical layer connectivity through protocol conversion, authentification, encryption, secure tunneling, role- and policy-based access, and supervisory analytics.
Organizations can use these systems to integrate key open-standards-based OT data acquisition and control technologies directly into the enterprise IT system responsible for running the analytics. Delivering fast, simple, and secure convergence between the necessary OT hardware and software components greatly reduces the latency between acquiring data, analyzing it, and acting on it.
“HPE’s Edgeline Converged Edge Systems provide an enterprise-class platform of converged compute, networking, storage, and systems management that can operate at the edge without the need for a cloud or complex data center infrastructure,” says Tom Bradicich, VP, HPE Fellow, and Global Head of the Edge and IoT Software Lab at HPE. “Customers can integrate IoT sensor data with business systems, including the Computerized Maintenance Management System, spare parts inventory, and related maintenance and operational systems to realize the maximum benefit from their physical assets. CBT is a unique and leading partner for the integration of these technologies into transformational industrial IoT solutions.”
Immediate Action
Businesses need their assets to operate at full capacity with the lowest maintenance costs. CM and PdM help them achieve that balance with streamlined asset management and visibility.
IoT-based CM and PdM Solutions are now financially viable for a wide range of industrial assets. Advances in computing power and decreasing costs enable organizations to put more power where devices are installed to gain real-time insights, create digital twins, or analyze data that often lacks a quality connection to centralized data analytics.
Manufacturers and processors can gain real-time local decision-making insights with CBT solutions powered by HPE Edgeline to support immediate action and achieve autonomous operations.
To start your CM and PdM journey with CBT and HPE, schedule a meeting today.