The next
BriefingsDirect Internet of Things (IoT) technology trends interview
explores how innovation is impacting modern factories and supply chains.
We’ll now learn how a leading-edge manufacturer, Hirotec, in the global automotive industry, takes advantage of IoT and Operational Technology (OT) combined to deliver dependable, managed, and continuous operations.
We’ll now learn how a leading-edge manufacturer, Hirotec, in the global automotive industry, takes advantage of IoT and Operational Technology (OT) combined to deliver dependable, managed, and continuous operations.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help
us to find the best factory of the future attributes is Justin Hester, Senior
Researcher in the IoT Lab at Hirotec Corp. in Hiroshima,
Japan. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Hester: Within the manufacturing space, a
lot of data has been there for years; for decades. Manufacturing has been very
good at collecting data. The challenges we've had, though, is bringing in that
data in real-time, because the amount of data is so large. How can we act on
that data quicker, not on a day-by-day basis or week-by-week basis, but
actually on a minute-by-minute basis, or a second-by-second basis? And how do
we take that data and contextualize it?
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What's happening in the market with
business and technology trends that’s driving this need for more modern
factories and more responsive supply chains?
Hester: Our customers are demanding shorter
lead times. There is a drive for even higher quality, especially in automotive manufacturing.
We’re also seeing a much higher level of customization requests coming from our
customers. So how can we create products that better match the unique needs of
each customer?
As we look
at how we can continue to compete in an ever-competitive environment, we are starting
to see how the solutions from IoT can help us.
Gardner: What is it about IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT) that allows
you to do things that you could not have done before?
 |
Hester |
It's one
thing in a manufacturing environment to say, “Okay, this machine is having a
challenge.” But it’s another thing if I can say, “This machine is having a
challenge, and in the context of the factory, here's how it's affecting
downstream processes, and here's what we can do to mitigate those downstream
challenges that we’re going to have.” That’s where IoT starts bringing us a lot of value.
The analytics,
the real-time contextualization of that data that we’ve already had in the manufacturing
area, is very helpful.
Gardner: So moving from what may have been a
gather, batch, analyze, report process -- we’re now taking more discrete analysis
opportunities and injecting that into a wider context of efficiency and
productivity. So this is a fairly big change. This is not incremental; this is a
step-change advancement, right?
A huge step-change
Hester: It’s a huge change for the market.
It's a huge change for us at Hirotec. One of the things we like to talk about
is what we jokingly call the Tuesday Morning Meeting. We talk about this idea
that in the morning at a manufacturing facility, everyone gets together and talks
about what happened yesterday, and what we can do today to make up for what
happened yesterday.
Why
don't we get the data to the right people with the right context and
let them make a decision so they can affect what's going on, instead of
waiting until tomorrow to react?
Instead, now
we’re making that huge step-change to say, “Why don't we get the data to the right people
with the right context and let them make a decision so they can affect what's
going on, instead of waiting until tomorrow to react to what's going on?” It’s
a huge step-change. We’re really looking at it as how can we take small steps right
away to get to that larger goal.
In manufacturing
areas, there's been a lot of delay, confusion, and hesitancy to move forward
because everyone sees the value, but it's this huge change, this huge project.
At Hirotec, we’re taking more of a scaled approach, and saying let's start
small, let’s scale up, let’s learn along the way, let's bring value back to the
organization -- and that's helped us move very quickly.
Gardner: We’d like to hear more about that success story but in the meantime, tell us about Hirotec for those who don't know of
it. What role do you play in the automotive industry, and how are you succeeding
in your markets?
Hester: Hirotec is a large, tier-1
automotive supplier. What that means is we supply parts and systems directly to
the automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), like Mazda, General
Motors, FCA, Ford, and we specialize in door manufacturing, as well as exhaust
system manufacturing. So every year we make about 8 million doors, 1.8 million
exhaust systems, and we provide those systems mainly to Mazda and General
Motors, but also we provide that expertise through tooling.
For example,
if an automotive OEM would like Hirotec’s expertise in producing these parts,
but they would like to produce them in-house, Hirotec has a tooling arm where
we can provide that tooling for automotive manufacturing. It's an interesting strategy that allows us to
take advantage of data both in our facilities, but then also work with our
customers on the tooling side to provide those lessons learned and bring them
value there as well.
Gardner: How big of a distribution are we talking
about? How many factories, how many countries; what’s the scale here?
Hester: We are based in Hiroshima, Japan,
but we’re actually in nine countries around the world, currently with 27
facilities. We have reached into all the major continents with automotive
manufacturing: we’re in North America, we’re in Europe, we’re all throughout
Asia, in China and India. We have a large global presence. Anywhere you find automotive
manufacturing, we’re there supporting it.
Discover How the
Gardner: With that massive scale, very small
improvements can turn into very big benefits. Tell us why the opportunity in a
manufacturing environment to eke out efficiency and productivity has such big
payoffs.
Hester: So especially in manufacturing,
what we find when we get to those large scales like you're alluding to is that
a 1 percent or 2 percent improvement has huge financial benefits. And so the
other thing is in manufacturing, especially automotive manufacturing, we tend
to standardize our processes, and within Hirotec, we’ve done a great job of
standardizing that world-class leadership in door manufacturing.
And so what
we find is when we get improvements not only in IoT but anywhere in
manufacturing, if we can get 1 percent or 2 percent, not only is that a huge
financial benefit but because we standardized globally, we can move that to our
other facilities very quickly, doubling down on that benefit.
Gardner: Well, clearly Hirotec sees this as
something to really invest in, they’ve created the IoT Lab. Tell me a little
bit about that and how that fits into this?
The IoT Lab works
Hester: The IoT Lab is a very exciting new
group, it's part of our Advanced Engineering Center (AEC). The AEC is a group
out of our global headquarters and this group is tasked with the five- to 10-year
horizon. So they're able to work across all of our global organizations with
tooling, with engineering, with production, with sales, and even our global
operations groups. Our IoT group goes and finds solutions that can bring value
anywhere in the organization through bringing in new technologies, new ideas,
and new solutions.
And so we
formed the IoT Lab to find how can we bring IoT-based solutions into the
manufacturing space, into the tooling space, and how actually can those
solutions not only help our manufacturing and tooling teams but also help our
IT teams, our finance teams, and our sales teams.
Gardner: Let's dig back down a little bit
into why IT, IoT and Operational Technology (OT) are into this step-change opportunity,
looking for some significant benefits but being careful in how to institute
that. What is required when you move to a more an IT-focused, a standard-platform
approach -- across all the different systems -- that allows you to eke these great
benefits?
Tell us about
how IoT as a concept is working its way into the very edge of the factory floor.
Hester: One of the things we’re seeing is
that IT is beginning to meld, like you alluded to, with OT -- and there really
isn't a distinction between OT and IT anymore. What we're finding is that we’re
starting to get to these solution levels by working with partners such as PTC
and Hewlett
Packard Enterprise (HPE) to bring our IT group and our OT group all together
within Hirotec and bring value to the organization.
What we
find is there is no longer a need in OT that becomes a request for IT to
support it, and also that IT has a need and so they go to OT for support. What
we are finding is we have organizational needs, and we’re coming to the table
together to make these changes. And that actually within itself is bringing even
more value to the organization.
Instead of
coming last-minute to the IT group and saying, “Hey, we need your support for
all these different solutions, and we’ve already got everything set, and you
are just here to put it in,” what we are seeing, is that they bring the
expertise in, help us out upfront, and we’re finding better solutions because we
are getting experts both from OT and IT together.
We are
seeing this convergence of these two teams working on solutions to bring value.
And they're really moving everything to the edge. So where everyone talks about
cloud-based computing -- or maybe it’s in their data center -- where we are
finding value is in bringing all of these solutions right out to the production
line.
We are
doing data collection right there, but we are also starting to do data
analytics right at the production line level, where it can bring the best value
in the fastest way.
Gardner: So it’s an auspicious time because
just as you are seeking to do this, the providers of technology are creating
micro data centers, and they are creating Edgeline converged systems, and they
are looking at energy conservation so that they can do this in an affordable way
-- and with storage models that can support this at a competitive price.
What is it
about the way that IT is evolving and providing platforms and systems that has gotten
you and The IoT Lab so excited?
Excitement at the edge
Hester: With IoT and IT platforms,
originally to do the analytics, we had to go up to the cloud -- that was the
only place where the compute power existed. Solution providers now are bringing
that level of intelligence down to the edge. We’re hearing some exciting things
from HPE on memory-driven computing, and that's huge for us because as we start
doing these very complex analytics at the edge, we need that power, that
horsepower, to run different applications at the same time at the production
line. And something like memory-driven
solutions helps us accomplish that.
It's
one thing to have higher-performance computing, but another to gain
edge computing that's proper for the factory environment.
It's one thing to have higher-performance computing, but
another thing to gain edge computing that's proper for the factory environment.
In a manufacturing environment it's not conducive to a standard servers, a
standard rack where it needs dust protection and heat protection -- that
doesn't exist in a manufacturing environment.
The other
thing we're beginning to see with edge computing, that HPE provides with Edgeline
products, is that we have computers that have high power, high ability to
perform the analytics and data collection capabilities -- but they're also
proper for the environment.
I don't
need to build out a special protection unit with special temperature control,
humidity control – all of which drives up energy costs, which drives up total costs.
Instead, we’re able to run edge computing in the environment as it should be on
its own, protected from what comes in a manufacturing environment -- and that's
huge for us.
Gardner: They are engineering these systems
now with such ruggedized micro facilities in mind. It's quite impressive that
the very best of what a data center can do, can now be brought to the very worst
types of environments. I'm sure we'll see more of that, and I am sure we'll see
it get even smaller and more powerful.
Do you have
any examples of where you have already been able to take IoT in the confluence
of OT and IT to a point where you can demonstrate entirely new types of
benefits? I know this is still early in the game, but it helps to demonstrate
what you can do in terms of efficiency, productivity, and analytics. What are
you getting when you do this well?
IoT insights save time and money
Hester: Taking the stepped strategy that we
have, we actually started at Hirotec very small with only eight machines in
North America and we were just looking to see if the machines are on, are they
running, and even from there, we saw a value because all of a sudden we were
getting that real-time contextualized insight into the whole facility. We then
quickly moved over to one of our production facilities in Japan, where we have
a brand-new robotic inspection system, and this system uses vision sensors,
laser sensors, force sensors -- and it's actually inspecting exhaust systems
before they leave the facility.
We very
quickly implemented an IoT solution in that area, and all we did was we said, “Hey,
we just want to get insight into the data, so we want to be able to see all
these data points. Over 400 data points are created every inspection. We want
to be able to see this data, compared in historical ways -- so let’s bring
context to that data, and we want to provide it in real-time.”
What we
found from just those two projects very quickly is that we're bringing value to
the organization because now our teams can go in and say, “Okay, the system is
doing its job, it's inspecting things before they leave our facility to make
sure our customers always get a high-quality product.” But now, we’re able to
dive in and find different trends that we weren't able to see before because
all we were doing is saying, “Okay, this system leaves the facility or this
system doesn't.”
And so
already just from that application, we’ve been able to find ways that our
engineers can even increase the throughput and the reliability of the system
because now they have these historical trends. They were able to do a root-cause
analysis on some improvements that would have taken months of investigation; it
was completed in less than a week for us.
And so
that's a huge value -- not only in that my project costs go down but now I am
able to impact the organization quicker, and that's the big thing that Hirotec is
seeing. It’s one thing to talk about the financial cost of a project, or I can
say, “Okay, here is the financial impact,” but what we are seeing is that we’re
moving quicker.
And so,
we're having long-term financial benefits because we’re able to react to things
much faster. In this case, we’re able to reduce months of investigation down to
a week. That means that when I implement my solution quicker, I'm now bringing that
impact to the organization even faster, which has long-term benefits. We are
already seeing those benefits today.
Gardner: You’ll obviously be able to improve
quality, you’ll be able to reduce the time to improving that quality, gain
predictive analytics in your operations, but also it sounds like you are going
to gain metadata insights that you can take back into design for the next
iteration of not only the design for the parts but the design for the tooling
as well and even the operations around that. So that intelligence at the edge
can be something that is a full lifecycle process, it goes right back to the
very initiation of both the design and the tooling.
Data-driven design, decisions
As
you loop this data back to our engineering teams -- what kind of
benefits can we see, how can we improve our processes, how can we drive
out into the organization?
Hester: Absolutely, and so, these solutions,
they can't live in a silo. We're really starting to look at these ideas of what
some people call the Digital Thread, the Digital Twin. We’re starting to
understand what does that mean as you loop this data back to our engineering
teams -- what kind of benefits can we see, how can we improve our processes,
how can we drive out into the organization?
And one of
the biggest things with IoT-based solutions is that they can't stay inside this
box, where we talked about OT to IT, we are talking about manufacturing,
engineering, these IoT
solutions at their best, all they really do is bring these groups together
and bring a whole organization together with more contextualized data to make
better decisions faster.
And so,
exactly to your point, as we are looping back, we’re able to start
understanding the benefit we’re going to be seeing from bringing these teams
together.
Gardner: One last point before we close out.
It seems to me as well that at a macro level, this type of data insight and
efficiency can be brought into the entire supply chain. As you're providing
certain elements of an automobile, other suppliers are providing what they
specialize in, too, and having that quality control and integration and reduced
time-to-value or mean-time-to-resolution of the production issues, and so forth,
can be applied at a macro level.
So how does
the automotive supplier itself look at this when it can take into consideration
all of its suppliers like Hirotec are doing?
Start small
Hester: It's a very early phase, so a lot
of the suppliers are starting to understand what this means for them. There is
definitely a macro benefit that the industry is going to see in five to 10
years. Suppliers now need to start small. One of my favorite pictures is a
picture of the ocean and a guy holding a lighter. It [boiling the ocean] is not
going to happen. So we see these huge macro benefits of where we’re going, but
we have to start out somewhere.
A lot of
suppliers, what we’re recommending to them, is to do the same thing we did,
just start small with a couple of machines, start getting that data visualized,
start pulling that data into the organization. Once you do that, you start
benefiting from the data, and then start finding new use-cases.
As these suppliers all start doing their own small projects
and working together, I think that's when we are going to start to see the macro
benefits but in about five to 10 years out in the industry.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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