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Cassy Gardner, Director of Operations at E Tech Group, recently presented “How to Get the Most Out of Your FEED Study” in an exclusive webinar. She provided a high-level overview of what a FEED study entails, explained the reasons for conducting one, and discussed various examples and challenges.
When a prominent manufacturer wanted to observe and interact remotely with their production line in real-time, E Tech Group software developers brought their 3D game development expertise to deliver an innovative digital twin of the line. The twin mimics the behavior of its real-life counterpart in real time, visible in a 3D environment via web interface.
A client was struggling with a bottleneck caused by an aging data lake that was stifling their ability to scale operations. E Tech Group’s Mission Critical team implemented a new system with limitless growth potential and centralized reporting, improving efficiency and productivity.
Our client had an existing data lake solution they quickly outgrew. As they increased the number of operational facilities and concurrent users accessing reports, the old design experienced an unanticipated bottleneck: with one API and one database servicing needs across the globe, adding more data and accessing the data in reports would take an average of thirty seconds per page, proving a barricade for future growth.
The client reached out to E Tech Group’s Mission Critical and Advanced Software teams to help with this issue; they trusted our long-standing partnership and expertise, giving us a small proof-of-concept budget for this new challenge.
Part of the obstacles to this aging data lake issue is that the client had already tried two existing solutions, both of which had failed. Understandably, they were gun-shy about undertaking a huge system retrofit with no surety of the result. Our Mission Critical and Advanced Software engineers would need a proof-of-concept solution that was foolproof at any scale.
Through this discovery effort, we identified that their current reporting practices were a pain point for them. They were using PowerBI reports and had thousands of single files, one per customer per report. Each one had to be manually managed and updated. We proposed a solution built upon a microservice architecture in Azure. This gave them data redundancy, fail-over, and a solution that scales horizontally with their business.
The remedy designed by our automation and IT engineers was multi-pronged:
First, we started with the cloud solution. The team built an API in Azure using ASP.NET 8, InfluxDB, and a time series database instead of the traditional choice of SQL. Since their data is measured and consumed over time, the purpose-built InfluxDB served the previously defined client needs, having a proven record of high performance and availability.
The last piece was to replace their PowerBI reports with a single-page application using React and TypeScript. The team tied into their existing systems and authentication to automatically retrieve customer-specific data and dynamically update the SPA. This allowed standardized reporting to be managed in a single location, one time.
Second, the client needed a way to get their operational data from their machines and buildings into their cloud solution. They had several disparate devices from multiple vendors, some using different communication protocols.
The team installed KepServerEX as a middleware between the hardware and Ignition that enabled the collection of information from varying devices into a central system. Then Ignition polled the data at a high frequency and writing to a store-forward database before aggregating it and sending the reduced set to the cloud for long-term storage and retrieval by client reporting.
This solution enabled the client to have data redundancy in case of communication failure or outages while also having high data granularity at the location most critical to operations.
Each of these pieces were deployed per facility and architected in such a way that multiple installations can service a single location, while a central gateway in Azure controls routing to needed resources. Due to the horizontal architecture, the client can scale their solution indefinitely without hitting a ceiling that would impact performance.
The client was thrilled with the initial success and decided to move to full implementation of the proof-of-concept, especially for the high-availability and SPA report system, which represents a massive quality-of-life-increase for multiple departments in the company. Our automation team successfully delivered on E Tech Group’s “Zero Defects” promise, even in the proof-of-concept phase.
The most promising prospect for their future with this new solution is the elimination of scaling barricades. The client will be able to increase the amount of telemetry data collected, and the number of facilities supported, and deliver a single, standardized reporting experience to their users. This new solution is faster, more intuitive, offers better insights, and more importantly, has the intelligence to automatically adapt to their business needs.
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In an era of increased frequency and sophistication of cyber threats, any one defensive approach can be hacked. To be fully guarded, a secured network must incorporate several different components. A cyberattack on an exposed OT network is a looming security risk with potentially devastating consequences, including extended production downtime, system reformatting and possible hardware replacement. The costs of a cyberattack can be financially catastrophic, but can also hurt your reputation or cause compliance issues that result in hefty fines and even shutdowns. Part 1 of this 2-part blog series helps the reader to understand both the challenge of securing a network as well as the urgent need to do so. Part 2 of the series will discuss most of the OT network components and structuring strategies that collectively build a Zero Trust network architecture. Cyberattacks are a reality; no one can avoid them forever. The goal is to be sufficiently resilient to remain in operation in the midst of an attack. And to accomplish that, we must understand the whats, whys and hows of industrial security automation. Understanding the OT Network in an Automated Facility The Operational Technology (OT) space on a plant floor is a highly complex network environment with distinct characteristics from its Information Technology (IT) network cousin. The space has traditionally been used in a limited manner, connecting local devices that communicate with each other for production purposes and little else. While these devices may be of varying ages and vulnerabilities, as a group their network use patterns are similar, and distinct from typical IT network traffic. Devices on an OT network are generally setup to run all the time, requiring very reliable, and continuous communication as they control and coordinate the manufacturing process. The lifespan of OT devices is typically longer than IT devices, which means … Continued
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