News & Knowledge

We’re your source for automation news. Keep up with the latest industry updates and E Tech employee spotlights, as well as tips and guidance from our manufacturing experts.  

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Questions answered: What is just enough industrial data analysis?

Director of Business Development, Laurie Cavanaugh presented a webcast for Control Engineering on Data Analysis with Matt Ruth of Avanceon. Below are a few participant questions and answers from the webcast. Who is typically the driving force to engage on analytics in a manufacturing plant?  A top-down approach to data analytics is typically driven by corporate and involves corporate IT and the use of accessible data in the form of financials and some operational data that has been consolidated (transactional data) based on enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence software. A bottom-up approach is typically driven by manufacturing departments or sites and starts with granular detail (time-series data) using historian databases and extraction tools offered by automation and controls manufacturers. Where true value and insight can be experienced is in the convergence of these two analytics’ efforts to connect the corporate financial and operational data with the more granular process execution data to provide a more thorough and holistic view of key factors that drive organizational decisions from top to bottom. What do you see as the future of analytics in manufacturing? The future is now. User expectations and demand for contextualized and intelligent information, driven by the tools used outside of the workplace, are countering old excuses or reasons for the failure to deliver fact-based analytics, directed decision making, and immediate access to critical information. Technical tools and platforms are not lacking. What is lagging is the complete understanding and response to the non-technical bottlenecks and barriers. Greater awareness of how analytics applies to processes and proper context for critical decision factors produce the value that addresses those non-technical barriers. Do you realistically see the wall between information technology (IT) and OT disappearing? The IT/OT wall or divergence must be overcome for the sake of shared responsibility: the … Continued

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Join us at Automate 2022

We’re excited to announce we will be exhibiting at Automate 2022 with our partners at  Apera AI. We hope you’ll SWING by at booth #4113 to see our ABB cobot TEEing up a golf related demonstration utilizing the latest in adaptive 4D vision technology.  You wont want to miss out! Click Here to Register for Automate 2022.

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E Tech Group Webcast: What is Just Enough Industrial Data Analysis?

E Tech Group’s Vice President of Business Development, Laurie Cavanaugh was a presenter for this Control Engineering webcast, where she and Matt Ruth, President of Avanceon, discuss what “just enough data analysis” is, pros and pitfalls, and the future of data analysis in automated manufacturing. The webcast included live Q&As from the audience, and was followed up with an article offering even more answers to automation professionals’ questions about data analytics in their plant processes. Just-in-time supply chain strategy limits were exposed in a global pandemic. Is just-enough industrial data analysis working for operations? Is the right data getting to the right people to optimize operations in time? Where are the bottlenecks and how are they being addressed? Where’s data going to become information and who’s seeing it? In the cloud or on premise or both? Are your knowledge brokers seeing the right information quickly enough to make the right decisions, or are your analytics too much, too late to be effective? Utilizing case studies as illustrations and an interactive format, Cavanaugh and Ruth advise control system integrators on how to: Determine if just-enough data analytics provides enough benefits to operations. Identify if enough data intelligence (results of analytics) is getting to people who matter. Examine bottlenecks in data analysis and how to address them. Review tools and architectures for eliminating bottlenecks. See lessons learned in applying data analytics (too little too late or just enough in time). This presentation focused on the future of data analytics in industrial manufacturing, including obstacles control engineers need to overcome in order to move forward in the industry and embrace the new role data analysis will take in the field. Visit E Tech Group’s blog for more automation industry news and insights.

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Just Enough Industrial Data Analysis
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Managing the Psychology of Change in Upgrades

“The best jobs we’ve had are the ones that have everyone involved up front, sitting down together at the beginning to discuss the project. Operations folks should also be engaged before the project starts. Get champions identified earlier on.” Craig Cooper, Engineering Account Manager, and Jason Phelps, Project Manager, recently authored a in a blog post for Automation World on the psychology of change and how to best prepare when taking on a project upgrade: Here’s a scenario—we’re contacted by a company to help them with a system upgrade. The client wants a system upgraded with Ethernet, databases, historians, etc. We provide a proposal, and upper-level engineering love it. Then, the project kicks off. But the boots-on-the-ground operations people hate it. They spend much of the project execution trying to make the new system exactly like it was before. Throughout this process, we try to coax the operations folks to see our way is better, and to show them why it’s better and how it will help them. It feels like a constant sales presentation. This results in a lot of rework, because we want to make them happy. And then as they adjust, they go back and forth on changes. Sound familiar? Often when companies approach an upgrade project, they go straight into the technology, functional requirements, and business needs. These are all very important considerations, but an important piece of the puzzle is missing: the psychology of the change itself and how best to manage it. To an operations team with production goals and other metrics to meet every shift, change is not exactly embraced with open arms. Change can mean adaptation (which takes time that they think they don’t have), it can be scary (even the best ideas can be poorly executed with catastrophic results, and they’ve probably seen … Continued

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