John Dyck, CEO of CESMII offers a comprehensive overview of the critical aspects shaping the landscape of modern manufacturing. Beginning with a warm welcome and agenda review, participants are introduced to the core themes driving the discussion. The session then delves into the evolution of the industry, tracing its journey through time and highlighting key milestones that have led to its current state.

John explains as we transition from one manufacturing era to another, it’s clear that legacy behaviors, business models and technology architectures must make way for new ones. CESMII’s mission to enhance U.S. manufacturing productivity through a collaborative ecosystem of partners, an interoperable technology standard and continuous improvement in workforce development and education will help break down those barriers

Jonathan Wise, Chief Technology Architect at CESMII walks through Standards-Based Information Models (SM Profiles), how they form the core of an interoperability-enabled architecture and facilitate infrastructure and application portability across different manufacturing systems, allowing for a much more strategic approach to manufacturing systems solutions development.  

He emphasizes the importance of normalizing data sources by investing in core methodologies and capabilities that enable the essential requirement to treat all data sources, regardless of complexity (simple sensors, cameras, manual data entry systems, PLCs, CNCs, robots, historians, DBs, etc.), as systematic inputs for SM Profiles.

John Louka, Application Engineer at CESMII, shares a forward-looking vision for interoperability and explores the realm of possibilities through five distinct examples (showcasing Ignition, Grafana, NCD Sensors, Tulip, Monday.com, Sorba.ai & Phoenix Contact) of contemporary use cases implemented with next-generation manufacturing applications.

To transition the industry from its current installed base to a “smart” architecture, our primary focus lies in removing the repetitive rework necessitated by the lack of portability. Depending on one’s position within the application value chain, a specific set of SM specifications is applied using a unified platform to uphold the architecture.

At the edge, a profile is utilized to gather data points and align them with the assets’ “information model.” Consequently, the data becomes readily accessible in a contextualized state to the upper echelons of applications via our modern GraphQI API.

Doug Lawson, Chief Executive Officer, ThinkIQ demonstrates the power of bringing together these interoperable solutions through the Smart Manufacturing Interoperability Platform – or what CESMII often refers to as the “SMIP”.

The Smart Manufacturing Interoperability Platform is an example of our interoperability solution to deliver Industrial Plug and Play to all production environments – discrete, hybrid, and process. The platform provides secure connectivity to your equipment and processes, and adds valuable context, so that applications can access your information intelligently and in an assisted or automated way.

The key technology in the platform is the concept of Profiles, the standards CESMII is creating to contextually describe sensors, equipment and processes, as well as the ability to create semantics for your data, showing how variables relate to each other. The combination of these new concepts in context, will enable the holy grail, the ability to define new systems, without the need for extensive middleware configuration or infrastructure maintenance and management.

Doug Lawson, Chief Executive Officer, ThinkIQ continues to demonstrate how a graph-based approach to information modelling (as opposed to hierarchical models) can enable significant new capabilities for analysis, and unlock valuable insights with a much more realistic and natural set of modeling relationships (material, energy, people, equipment, networks, etc.).

Rob Schoenthaler, CRO at ThinkIQ reviews how the manufacturing sector has been leveraging costly vision systems for inspection use cases for decades. However, in the Smart Manufacturing era, Vision can be used for so much more – while also being simple and cost-effective. Learn how simple vision systems can be used to create “Visual Twins” of physical operations, including equipment, materials and people, and be integrated into the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Platform just like a PLC.

Doug Lawson, Chief Executive Officer, ThinkIQ returns to delve into the intricacies of how products/materials move through equipment and processes, managing material flow within manufacturing operations, and beyond into the supply chain – ultimately providing a natural and powerful way of managing complex events and data structures that support standards-based reporting, regulatory requirements, genealogy, track-and-trace, etc.

Lastly, Jonathan Wise, Chief Technology Architect at CESMII closes the workshop by discussing the enormous value of an open, graph-based API that facilitates both, modern application development, and app development that’s completely abstracted from the complexities of disparate and differing plant floor data sources and ingestion infrastructure so prevalent in manufacturing operations.