To understand why industry might need unified namespace (UNS), look to the problems facing industrial automation. Many manufacturers have data available from individual machines and pieces of equipment, often lots of data, but bringing that information together across machines and systems is the real challenge.
UNS can help simplify data organization long-term and streamline integration across devices, systems and users. The current approach to integration with point-to-point connections is slowing down technology adoption and leaving projects in proof-of-concept purgatory. It’s a long way to go for manufacturers that lack any insight into their machine data or the infrastructure to collect and analyze that data, and a hefty upfront investment and culture change may be needed, says Brian Pribe, president of system integrator Mach Controls, but he also believes UNS will define the future winners and losers in automation.
What is unified namespace?
“It’s an architecture, delivering data to the systems, services and processes that need that data, how they need it and when they need it,” Pribe says. “It’s all about serving that data to the consumers of that data.”
Mach Controls has seen many of its manufacturer customers struggle with connecting, collecting and analyzing all the data available to manufacturers. “It's been a very, very difficult challenge for many manufacturers, just to be able to connect to their machines, connect to their processes, connect to the applications, connect to whatever devices that they have on the plant floor, and be able to aggregate that data and make sense of the data,” he says.
Unified namespace is one solution to the overwhelming data problem. “It provides a central interface, a hub for all of these events that are occurring in your business, where they can land, and where those events can be transmitted to any other system that could care about that information,” Pribe says.
While most identify UNS as an “architecture,” the labels can get murky quickly, given the vast landscape for industrial automation, Pribe says. “You may have a database, or you may have a programmable logic controller (PLC), or you may have even a digital micrometer. How are you able to connect to that device, get that information and make that available to whatever system actually needs it? And what does that look like? What does that architecture look like?” he asks.
While the current definitions might be imprecise and its standard guidelines undeveloped, Pribe is still sure that UNS will define the future of automation. “What we see is that those that don't have a unified namespace will not be able to compete, and they won't be in business for very long,” Pribe says. “It's fairly simple, and it comes down to tracking what you're doing. Those with a unified namespace can track every second of everything that their business is doing, from the production machines, from the process values that they're measuring, all the way to their inventory systems.”
How point-to-point connections are slowing digital transformation
Mach Controls focuses on small- to medium-sized manufacturers and is helping many of these customers first connect machines and collect their important data. In traditional manufacturing, Pribe says, “Everything is really a point-to-point connection.”
Pribe paints this scenario, which he has seen repeatedly: a digital transformation initiative comes down from corporate. They want to get all the data from all the machines and make sense of all the data. What typically happens, Pribe says, and where manufacturers go wrong is the plant starts with one use case, maybe a big bottleneck at the plant. They do, in fact, solve this bottleneck issue, including tangible return on investment. Then, management says, do it again, on the next production line.
“This is where you’re getting into proof-of-concept purgatory, where every time that you’re integrating with the next system, it becomes almost more complicated and expensive than it was integrating the first system,” Pribe says. The problem could be the digital strategy for integration and how it’s delivering the data to the different systems, and it’s further complicated by old infrastructure and machines that communicate differently.
“The systems and the equipment that manufacturers use day to day that are 100% important to their business, there is no way for them to get data from those systems and equipment, as simply as being able to tell it where to connect to and where to provide that information at. That's what's very difficult in the manufacturing environment, where they have thousands of these different systems that all need to provide data in the same way. And that's what's very difficult right now. Part of the issue with the traditional systems are that they really aren't dedicated to connecting to all the various equipment, tools, applications, processes and devices that are required for your business to know everything that is going on,” Pribe says.
Many manufacturers are unsure of how to connect all the disparate systems and collect this information, store it, visualize it and act on it. System integrators can help make this happen more automatically and efficiently with UNS, Pribe says, rather than having to do many point-to-point integrations.
Ultimately, UNS should make this easier and provides a minimal interface for system integrators to connect to operations, processes, devices and applications. “All of this information is then unified and made available, and that's really the power of it and what the traditional systems aren't able to provide,” he adds.
Some of the manufacturers that work with Mach Controls don’t have the infrastructure to collect all their data from systems and machines. Even with one unified architecture overseeing everything, it’s still a large leap for some to connect the various devices and tools, equipment and systems. “The reason for this is that the vast majority of manufacturers have zero insight about what's actually going on in their operations. If you ask them about how many parts one of their CNCs has produced today, you would be lucky if you had one operator who had been paying attention that whole time. If the operator doesn't know, then the plant manager certainly doesn't know, and the production scheduler certainly doesn't know,” Pribe says.
What are UNS challenges for system integrators?
While the small to medium-sized manufacturers that work with Mach Controls are largely behind the game in digital transformation, some big players in manufacturing and ecommerce, such as Tesla, Amazon and Moderna, are using this type of architecture, Pribe says. “They may call it different things,” he says. “But they leverage a data infrastructure for connecting to all of their equipment, their operations, their processes and their applications, so that the data is made available to whatever system it has.”
Optimization through data analytics is the next make-or-break step for Mach Controls customers. “Tesla, Amazon, they are using data to drive their business. If you are not using data to drive your business, expect to be going out of business sometime soon,” Pribe says.
The amount of information that is made available with UNS is “astounding,” he adds. “Those that aren't, that don't have that information, won't be able to compete. It's one of those things where if you're not tracking what you're doing, you just simply can't compete,” Pribe says.
One of the challenges with UNS is the upfront cost. Right now, UNS is a hefty initial investment, Pribe says. He estimates that five to 10 IT staff are needed to build out a UNS architecture, from nothing to a proof-of-concept infrastructure. The process takes between 12 to 18 weeks and costs $35,000 to $50,000.
Pribe says the big difficulty for machine builders and systems integrators is, traditionally, this is not something that is inside of their wheelhouse. “This requires IT skills. This requires IT practices and programming. This isn't something where you could buy something off the shelf like an OT solution,” he says.
To support industry knowledge and education around UNS, Mach Controls has partnered with 4.0 Solutions, which offers education and training for digital transformation in manufacturing, and Mach Controls provides some education and support for UNS events. Mach Controls has also partnered with Unified Manufacturing Hub, based in the United Kingdom, which has a free, open-source UNS solution. “You can do anything you want with it. You could fork the repository, you can modify it, and essentially at the end of the day, you can own the infrastructure, and you can own the data,” Pribe says. “We actively promote them and are trying to share their software and what solutions we're able to provide with it, because we see this as something that the industry needs as a whole.”
Will the next generation demand UNS and a data revolution?
The work involved with UNS architecture and data analysis might also attract younger workers to manufacturing. The old way of Excel spreadsheets isn’t sticking around in the future, Pribe predicts. “A lot of the things that run manufacturing, the people that run it, those people are going to be gone. A lot of the young people, the millennials, the Gen Z people, they're not going to be taking up jobs filling up spreadsheets for production orders that they could have been automated had they had the information from the machines,” Pribe says.
It is partly a generational shift taking place in the industry, Pribe says. Consider PLC development, which has not gone far since its start. “We are just now starting to get some ability, as an example, to have a web server on a PLC. Why are we just now discovering this after we’ve had the internet for 30 years,” he asks.
Largely, technological advancements happen slowly in industry. “The technical developments that have been happening in the IT side of the industry have not come close to impacting the OT side,” Pribe says, adding that some of those in charge of manufacturing operations, often older generations, haven’t bought into new technology or transforming into digital operations.
“What we're seeing right now is the people with the authority to make the decisions on deploying more of these technologies, actually leveraging the data, they're not doing so. They don't see the power up; they don't see the advantage of it; and a lot of it is because they're not as digitally mature. They're on the older side, and they don't see the value with it,” Pribe says.
The newer generations in the workforce grew up on the internet, and he adds, “The next generation does not want to be dealing with Excel spreadsheets.”
