Solutions Podcast Series

Embrace the Digital

October 06, 2021 ABB Motors and Mechanical US Season 1 Episode 12
Solutions Podcast Series
Embrace the Digital
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode of the ABB Solutions Podcast, host Mike Murphy is joined by Mike Maida, business development manager for ABB products to discuss how to be successful using ABB Ability™. Listen as Maida explains how ABB Ability™ can bridge the skill gap our industry is currently seeing and how to get past the fear of cloud technology.

Learn more about ABB Ability Smart Sensor
Watch about condition monitoring solutions for motors

To learn more about ABB's Baldor-Reliance motors, please visit baldor.abb.com.

Mike Murphy:

Welcome to the ABB solutions podcast where we address challenges faced in our industry. I'm your host, Mike Murphy speaking to you from Greenville, South Carolina. Today we have Mike Maida, Business Development Manager for ABB products. He's here to speak with us on how to be successful using the ABB Ability. Alright, Mike to start. There's a lot of talk regarding Industry 4.0. So does this just apply to digitalization?

Mike Maida:

Mike, no, I think that's a great question. The definition that I like to use, and kind of benchmark around, is the statement that the integration of information and communication technology in the industrial environment is, in and of itself a broad definition for Industry 4.0. But, aside from digitalization, you have optimization, customization, human machine interaction, value added services that are byproducts of that digital journey, and the automatic data exchange and communication that exists between the manufacturer and the production equipment. And that's where I'd like to focus our discussion today in and around the 4.0 solutions, or digitalization solutions ABB offers, and what that breadth of product. What can we do with it? And where does it fit into our manufacturer partners?

Mike Murphy:

Okay, great. So digital, a lot of people may think Bluetooth. So, can you talk about how can we leverage Bluetooth technologies?

Mike Maida:

You know, it's a very cost effective means of communication. So, prior to industrial Bluetooth, we would, you know, traditionally have conduit runs wire, pulled. Think about that wire, something plugged into each side of that is probably fairly expensive. So on one side, you're plugging it into a device, whether that be PLC, a drive sensor of some form you have a wire going back to a server, the wiring is extremely expensive. So is the, what you're plugging into. And so you're eliminating that cost in the deployment of a digital solution. So number one, I think Bluetooth is a extremely inexpensive way to dynamically and agile development, infrastructure, or an architecture very inexpensively. You know, and the second thing is that more and more devices are being able to connect via Bluetooth. So it's not uncommon to see a, maybe a device inside of a cabinet that's giving us a Bluetooth signal on temperatures and interior environmental status. But it also, you know, you have a worker with a pair of glasses on that's communicating Bluetooth to a device, and we're

using it for safety:

Before we open a cabinet, What's the temperature? What's the interior environment look like? So Bluetooth both sides of the fence from a machine broadcasting the information we're trying to garner, Bluetooth, or the worker using Bluetooth devices to go out and capture that information. Just an extremely inexpensive means of communication. I think number one, that's probably at the heart of it.

Mike Murphy:

Alright, so let's dive into sensing equipment. I keep hearing about how smart sensors can measure temperature vibration. What other ways can the ABB ability technology be useful to an end user?

Mike Maida:

Let's step back and talk about migration of that product. When the product was initially developed, we were looking to roll out a predictive maintenance device. And if we're just talking about the ABB Ability Smart Sensor for motors, that product, when we, when we initially rolled that out was meant to determine the temperature that a machine was run at, an electric motor was run at; the frequency that it was run at; stop, starts, how it was stopped, started, all of these things brought, went into an algorithm and it would have a smart result at the end saying'It's probably time for maintenance", you know. And after collecting billions of data points and refining algorithms, we were quickly able to figure out, "Hey, if we can determine when a machine needs maintenance, could we determine its failure point?" And the answer to that is, Yes. So looking through trending, we can tell, you know, where will maintenance intervene shutdown, and where will replacement have to occur in order, you know, to man at uptime. And so we started looking at it from that perspective, and we're able to help our customers bring their standard deviation of unplanned power train failures down significantly. So that was kind of the first adoption, right? We had a maintenance tool. We then leveraged that into a predictive failure device. And now, where else can we use that data? We're understanding better how to communicate through maintenance, storeroom, and procurement. Because if you have a machine that you're measuring its vibration, its heat, its health, its predictive failure points. And you're now sharing that information with your storeroom clerk, and is there a spare? And if not, are we automating messages to the procurement team to initiate RFQ. And so it's becoming more deeply entrenched into the culture of keeping that uptime paramount, and making sure that you're cognisant of reducing unplanned failures. And if there is a failure, byproduct of that is the exercise of organizing the storeroom and organizing digital paths for purchase. It's much more than just how hot and shaky is it. It's a communication platform.

Mike Murphy:

Alright, Mike, talk to us on how the ABB digital technology can help us bridge the skill gap our industry is currently seeing.

Mike Maida:

You know, that in and of itself is a huge topic: tribal run off and skill gap billing. But immediately what the ABB Ability platform can do is take out that tribal knowledge that may exist. So let's use an example of an employee, we'll call this employee Boomer, Baby Boomer, and comes to work early every day starts coffee, walks the floor, and by sixth sense or hearing understanding this process through a tenure of working at the plant, there's something wrong, right? "Hey, Larry, go over there and take a look. That doesn't sound right." So now when you plug in a completely new set of individuals, they're looking at things through a different lens, but they also don't have that tenure of understanding. So, now when we put a sensor on that motor and drive train, right, so now we're managing the health of the power train autonomously without the intervention of Boomer. We're able to, you know, quickly take that off of that individual's job description, if you will. It circumvents that tribal knowledge that exists in the marketplace today, on how your equipment is running either by feel or by having a tenure of running it. Now we just get clean, clear data from it. That's real time. And we're able to take out that whole process of trying to garner an understanding of how your platform is running. You can actually quantify by how the process is running. I don't think we'll ever be able to solve the skill set challenge with digitalization, but we can definitely plug holes that exist when you start to introduce tribal runoff and people leaving, retiring, backfilling that with new individuals. Again, it's an entire cultural issue. But you can take the communication from machine to human and automate those processes that certainly shores up what some of [what] Boomer did,

Mike Murphy:

We hear a little bit of fear of cloud technology; perhaps the cost of infrastructure, or on site versus off site data storage. Can you expand more on that about the pros and cons of this cloud based technology, and data storage?

Mike Maida:

At the heart of slow adoption to cloud based edge computing is fear. You know, fear that my intellectual property is going to be compromised. And the other part is, you know, we're fighting a decade of selling on-site solutions. So large name corporations that sell firewalls and hardware solutions, where you have a server on site and hey, your data is protected, because it's over there behind that locked wall in that server, you can't get to it any other way. You know, we're finding that even those infrastructures are vulnerable. You look at the news and just our recent pipeline issue and and maybe some of the shops that you visited in the past, you hear data breaches and those types of things. What I think is important about cloud based computing is, I don't think people really realize, that the author of the math that's happening, the algorithm, it's happening cloud side, right? So we're taking all these bits and frequencies and hertz and we're taking all of this data, zeros and ones binary data, and we're we're telling a story of the health; how this machine is doing. If you were able to intercept that value of that data is zero, it doesn't lead to a recipe on how I'm building a product. That doesn't infringe upon the ability to get into somebody's intellectual property. I think when you, when you also look at, you have vested parties on your side of digital securities, when that cloud is really a rack space, in a data silo that's owned by one of the three giants, right? - Google, Microsoft, Amazon - So you have Microsoft, Google and Amazon fighting for security to make sure that there's no breach in their cloud environment. You have the author of the algorithm, in this case, ABB Ability. ABB's concern of security on that 128 bed encrypted data transmission. The customer should feel safe, that there's enough vested interest in the data exchange, that it's much bigger than just their intellectual property. I think at the heart of it, it's really muscle memory and decades of selling hardware solutions, because that cloud infrastructure may not have been as robust as it is today.

Mike Murphy:

Okay, great. That is all the time we have. Remember if you would like more information on the ABB Ability Digital Solution, contact your local ABB sales representative. If you have questions regarding this podcast series, visit us at US-solutions@abb.com. Thanks and have a great rest of your day.