Digital transformation in manufacturing offers huge gains, but it isn’t something you can buy off the shelf. It is a journey that must be carefully orchestrated to mitigate the risk of breaking existing processes or introducing new security risks.
CuBE Manufacturing, a producer of environmentally conscious and ethically manufactured containers for the food industry, sought to double their production capacity by adding new state-of-the-art injection moulding systems. However increasing capacity wasn’t enough in itself; they also wanted to leverage Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) ideas to increase productivity, quality and throughput.
At its most basic level, IIoT gathers data from sensors, brings that data together with data from other sources, then derives useful information to automate or improve an operation.
The challenge in industrial environments is the machines you want to measure have traditionally been the domain of the manufacturing operations team, and run on self-contained proprietary control systems. This is the world of OT or Operational Technology, typically managed by the factory operations team.
The world of IT or Information Technology, on the other hand, runs on IP protocols, utilizing standard networking and x86 based servers running an application on a standard IT operating system or cloud platform. In addition, this world of IT is usually managed by the IT team.
Bridging the worlds of IT and OT can be challenging both from a technology and cultural perspective, so working with an ecosystem of partners with experience in each domain can help to ensure you don’t introduce new problems into the system. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as an ecosystem integrator, has brought together both OT and IT partners to help introduce the benefits of IIoT to CuBE Packaging.
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