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Robotics help a post-pandemic world
Manufacturing analytics transition organization from barriers to benefits and from lack of expertise to real-time actionable insights, among other benefits. Courtesy: L&T Technology Services Ltd.
new-age, future-facing engineering applications will be key enablers.
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Making legacy systems future ready depends on key decisions. First and foremost, a thorough understanding of the needs will dictate the most appropriate digital strategy. As the business plan will rely on the digital strategy, it is important to align it with short-, medium-, and long-term goals. Once the strategy is in place, the right engineering applications will determine the success of the overall digital transformation experience.
Size digital transformation to fit
Digital transformation initiatives across industries have shown that one size doesn’t fit all, and instead, the approach has to be horses-for-courses. For instance, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can help integrate machines and processes, but they are not the best bet when it comes to long-term, future-proof changes.
Organizations embarking on digital transformation often end up biting more than they can chew by entrusting IT teams with the responsibility of writing, testing and deploying in-house integration solutions. While such decisions are brave, the cost, time and risk they entail make them not worth making. This hastiness is detrimental as it can completely derail the initiative before it is initiated.
In the end, the most important aspect of digital transformation is ensuring timely changes in small installments. Data plays a crucial role in bringing every element of the process up to pace, and it is therefore paramount for organizations to create a robust and holistic database, accumulating data from every single end point.
In a digital landscape strewn with smart devices, every bit of data collected by engineering applications from various ERP, customer relationship
management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), and supply chain management (SCM) systems is critical. The idea should lead to making incremental changes without putting massive pressure on either IT or operations technology (OT).
Agile automation, human involvement
For the process to be agile, humans too have a crucial role to play. Radical changes are bound to attract resistance and cynicism, especially when machines tend to become more autonomous. However, it is important that company leaderships take the onus of making the human workforce aware of the purpose of digitization and how it can benefit everyone. In essence, digital transformation is as much about business progress as it is about easing human lives. The cultural change has to be the bedrock for initiatives such as size, scale and scope.
Digital transformation will make machines smarter and vitalize human skills by using them in more critical and perspective-driven jobs. Human-machine synergy is pivotal to the scoping of tasks and thereby increasing overall productivity across enterprises.
The future has arrived. Are we ready for digital transformation? ce
Narayanan Ramanathan is global head of digital engineering, L&T Technology Services Ltd., a Control Engineering content partner. Edited by Mark T. Hoske, content manager, Control Engineering, CFE Media and Technology, mhoske@cfemedia.com.
Cybersecurity tips
Cybersecurity advice about process, technologies, people (internal) and external threat resulted from the Control Engineering 2020 Cybersecurity Research Report.
Those answering the 2020 Control Engineering cybersecurity survey provided advice to peers based on knowledge and experiences. A summary follows. Data was collected Feb. 7 through March 5. Answers are lightly edited for grammar; tips covering multiple categories generally fall in the group matching the first tip. A categorical tally of 48 cybersecurity tips showed: 20 cybersecurity related to processes; 17 cybersecurity related to technologies; 9 cybersecurity related to people (internal) and 2 cybersecurity related to external threats. A sampling follows. See twice the advice online.
Cybersecurity tips: process
Always be active and vigilant to stay ahead of the threats.
Be prepared for the unthinkable.
Being aware of deficiencies in your cyber defenses only brings to light opportunities you have to improve. Don’t be afraid of audits. They should only help provide knowledge, understanding and management support allowing for change for the better to happen.
Closely follow the updates and trends. Be aware of vulnerability and incidents.
Follow security basic industry best practices.
Have the proper governance and resources in place, for both engineering and operational technology (OT).
Make sure a project incorporates the
cybersecurity at the beginning of the project. Think about cybersecurity early in the design process. It is much harder to implement later.
Tips on technology
ALWAYS UPDATE. Be proactive and start implementing new appliance/ software to protect your/the customers assets. Mark T. Hoske, Content Manager Do not allow any mobile or external device to have read/ write privileges. Some remote observation might be allowed. Do timeout detection and recovery (TDR) for all hardware connections to detect the impedance change caused by any connection. On detection connect to sandbox and attempt to back trace source of intrusion. Sandbox runs simulation program, but has no actual access to control system. Secure you equipment now; don’t wait for an attack. Use a random password generator.
Cybersecurity tips: people
Cybersecurity is real and has to be treated seriously. Don’t let IT fool senior management into thinking they can secure the process control domain! User education is the biggest threat to security. No matter how advanced or expensive something is, we need users to be educated.
Cybersecurity tips: External
M More INSIGHTS It is helpful to look beyond national borders and English language dominated sources. Kindly don’t allow external devices to See more tips and bar graph of be plugged to your controls without con-cybersecurity products and services with this online article: Click the head in the digital edition: www.controleng.com/magazine. sidering the consequences. Think again about opportunities for See also a prior article online based on cybersecurity improvements as a process this research: Cybersecurity requires asset rather than event and see three articles updates at www.controleng.com/research on cybersecurity in this issue. ce
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