Manufacturing Today Issue - 221 February 2024 | Page 68

Exclusive Feature ______________________________________________________________________________________________
Bridging the gap between OT and IT
End users , OEMs , and SIs have expended significant effort to customize , integrate , and support OT / IT solutions . In recent years , Edge Computing has emerged as an essential intermediate technology , effectively bridging and overlapping both OT and IT environments .
OT personnel in discrete manufacturing must be able to focus on OT tasks . However , they are often at risk of playing an IT functional role troubleshooting industrial PCs or aging servers . They additionally must work with IT counterparts to select manufacturing applications and capabilities to progress operations and deliver value .
Conversely , IT expertise is valuable to the deployment of infrastructure for operational requirements . An area of intersection is often associated with control rooms and enterprise servers , which are the IT foothold in the OT world . IT benefits OT by bringing its skillset and tools , including cloud services , to the manufacturing environment .
Although different , these domain priorities are intertwined with one another – the combined expertise of both OT and IT enable integrations between new software and OT production processes as well as improved data-driven decision-making , which in turn enhances productivity .
Industrial hardware , software , and communications technologies have improved greatly over the past decades , but standard OT-based products have fallen short as complete smart manufacturing solutions . Greater data connectivity and processing capability is needed at the edge to support both OT and IT smart manufacturing roles , including :
■ Unified connectivity with OT and IT devices , new and old
■ Data aggregation , storage , contextualization , and preprocessing
■ Improved operator visualization experiences , especially when using mobile devices
■ Remote access for support of equipment by specialists , regardless of where both are located
■ Hosting analytics and applications for determining KPIs , OEE , asset utilization , production performance , predictive maintenance , and more
Edge Computing platforms are filling these roles by providing a reliable , easily supportable , and OT-capable solution in a compact form factor . Edge platforms meet the IT-based computing , communications , and cyber standards needed to overcome challenges and create truly smart manufacturing solutions .
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