What is the Digital Factory? - YouTube

[Walker] So what is the Digital Factory?

Or what is a digital factory?

So at it's base level the digital factory is...

no more paper.

So it's just no paper at all.

This concept of the 4th Industrial Revolution

is essentially the digitization of manufacturing

When the Germans wrote the Industry 4.0 specification,

the standard,

their idea was let's get rid of paper.

That's the fourth Industrial Revolution.

The Digital Factory is the idea that

people only interface with equipment

and equipment only interfaces with equipment

and people only consume from software.

That's the digital factory.

The value of the Digital Factory is that

we decrease the number of errors

because we're taking the data

from the source of truth

we've already established that this

layer in the stack talks to our equipment

our equipment has all the information we want

What are we running?

When did we run?

How were we running?

What did we produce?

That's all we really care about.

ERP handles all of our scheduling.

What should I be running?

Right now, taking the schedule and

getting it down to the plant floor

is almost always through paper

and through people.

We have established that people make mistakes.

Here's the other thing

when our schedule in the ERP system

is not connected to our operations on the floor

the OT.. this is the IT.. when they're not connected..

then the accuracy of my schedule

is wholly based on the person

who knows the most about what's going on the floor.

When you use an IIoT protocol...

and you are building a digital factory...

my schedule is relying on data that's coming

directly from my equipment.

And I can update my schedule

we can write algorithms to update the schedule..

in real time..

without a person having to execute decisions.

The Digital Factory is: no more paper.

The Digital Factory is: connected stack.

What's that mean?

My equipment is connected to

SCADA

MES

ERP

and our Cloud based analytics

and there's no paper in between.

That's the Digital Factory.

The Digital Factory has real-time metrics

not supervisors making decisions

based on data from yesterday

some report that was produced in the morning

they're making decisions based on real-time metrics

not just real-time SCADA metrics

but metrics related to our schedule..

new sales that just came in..

hot lots that have to run..

in real time digitally.

[Zack] Currency exchange rates

[Walker] Currency exchange rates exactly...

current weather..

shipping...

We got a hot lot that's going out.

It's going from Dallas to Nebraska.

We got a major snowstorm coming through

Kansas and Oklahoma.

therefore it's not going to even get...

even in the best weather...

we can't assume best weather..

we got to multiply by two and say that

now our shipping dates going to be 8 days instead of 4.

That is the idea of real-time data analytics using IIoT.

Here's the other thing...

Big Data Analytics is the Digital factory..

Now we call this a lot of things.

So this is predictive maintenance.

They call it predictive maintenance...

I like to think of it much bigger.

This would be: machine learning.

The Digital Factory has real-time analytics..

that's not just using the data from the floor

but it's using data from the past.

What have we learned from the data we've collected..

stored it in a data lake..

What have we learned from that information?

Oil and Gas has been very very good at this.

What oil and gas did.. and you know Lufkin Sam

the Luftkin Sam pump off controller

what they were really famous for

they collected decades of down hole data

decades of tubing and casing pressure data

so that is just on these oil rigs

that are pumping

they're constantly collecting the pressures on tubing

casing flow etc. and they just stored.

that they combine that with information

from maintenance people whenever they saw a failure

so they were just plotting that data all the time

and then they took it and they combined it

with information from the lease operator

"We had failure X when we saw this type of chart."

They have twenty to thirty years of data.

Problem is is you can't..

There's no Big Data machine..

there's no Big Data algorithm..

that analyzes all that yet.

What you want to be able to do

is have programs that are running in the cloud

to go look at our historical data

look at the information that our operators gave us

and predict that we are driving right into..

something we've already learned could happen.

So that's big data analytics.

So those are the four fundamental elements

of what the Digital Factory is.

The Digital Factory has no paper.

It's completely connected through the stack.

You have real-time metrics all the way through the stack

from ERP, MES, SCADA, PLC, HMI, and the cloud

and you are doing big data analytics

That is the Digital Factory.

[Zack] What is a digital factory not?

[Walker] A digital fac...

[laughs]

A Digital Factory is not (just) andon boards

A Digital Factory is not..

[Zack] zero people

[Walker] No people

[laughs]

So in the United States this is this is a huge problem.

When we start talking about

digital transformation and the digital Factory

your operators in your plant start freaking out.

"I'm gonna lose my job"

[Zack] What's an andon board?

[Walker] An andon board is.. think of a stack light.

So a stack light a stack light is..

a simple one is green, yellow, red.

Red: we're doing bad

Yellow: we are going into bad area

Green: everything is going great.

An andon board is essentially..

these are discrete values an andon

board is essentially a television display

that is telling you how you're doing.

That's what an andon board is.

Digital Factory is not andon boards..

a lot of people think that it is. It isn't.

It's not a digital schedule.

It is not mobile notifications.

It is not email notification of alarm management.

It is all of those things...

and much much more.

but if you want to break it down to its base

it's no more paper

it's a connected stack

it's real-time metrics

and it's big data analytics

That's the digital factory.

[Zack] So you were about to say people freak out when they hear digital factory.

[Walker] People freak out when they hear Digital Factory

because they think it's no people

that isn't what it is

what it is is companies are not innovating

because their people are spending their time

doing this type of stuff

and what they aren't spending their time doing

is analyzing this type of data

and making the operation run more efficiently.

So think about it I'm a widget manufacturer

what is the reason that I can't produce

if I'm producing 5 million widgets a year out of my plant

what's the reason I'm not producing 10 million?

Is it because I can't sell 10 million?

No. If I can sell 5 million widgets

I can sell 10 million million widgets.

We're gonna have 8 billion people in the world.

If there are people who want to buy 5 million

of my widgets. I can sell 10 million of them.

The reason that I can't sell 10 million is capacity.

And the only way to increase capacity is either to..

invest hundreds of millions of dollars in..

building new facilities or...

make my current facilities more efficient.

When you are an operator or maintenance person...

and you hear Digital Factory..

and the first thing you think is..

"I'm gonna be automated out of my job"

You are looking at Digital Factory from

the completely wrong perspective.

What Digital Factory does is

It creates higher paying jobs

so that people can stop doing this

and start doing that.