BAKU, Azerbaijan, May 18
By Leman Zeynalova – Trend:
Trend’s exclusive interview with Uygar Doyuran, president of High Growth Regions, Turkey & Central Asia, Honeywell
Question: How is Honeywell preparing for Industry 4.0?
A.: Industry 4.0 represents a vast leap forward in the capabilities of the technologies that power industries all over the world. This new era of technological innovation brings with it unprecedented levels of data availability, computational power and connectivity. As customers have become more mobile – demanding and receiving near instantaneous service – companies are either embracing these new technologies or becoming relics of the past.
At Honeywell, we believe the future of any business can be powered by insights hidden in its data, with more accurate models driving more predictive approaches. We’re at the leading edge of this, with our capabilities in industrial hardware, software and cloud-based data analytics that, together, can drive previously unobtainable insight from virtually any industrial operation.
Whether that’s showing customers where they can improve production throughput, improve profitability, reduce energy consumption, predict system failures and prevent shutdowns before they occur, operate their systems remotely or maximize employee safety, we have a solution for it.
So, it’s not so much a case of us preparing for Industry 4.0, as it is us driving the evolution forward.
Q.: What are the core technologies that Honeywell has, to help companies capitalize on this evolution?
A: Enterprises are being tasked to be more productive and efficient while cutting costs. To get there, they need to digitally transform to enable remote and autonomous operations that improve over time, bring new insights to generate meaningful business intelligence, and extend these capabilities easily to new systems as infrastructure builds out.
In response, Honeywell has created a new category of software that we call Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). This is how we describe technology that helps enterprises unify their data, decision making and business goals to optimize and automate their operational processes, assets and people. EPM ensures businesses can answer critical questions about performance, sustainability and safety in real-time, and at any level of hierarchy within the company – from control room to boardroom.
Honeywell Forge is Honeywell’s Enterprise Performance Management Software-as-a-Service. Honeywell Forge accelerates digital transformation by providing apps that deliver very short term ROI, maintaining real-time data connectivity and systems of record, future-proofing infrastructure via extensible applications and the ability into integrate into virtually any infrastructure, avoiding the need for capital-intensive rip-and-replace upgrades.
By connecting software and hardware solutions, Honeywell Forge measures, optimizes and automates operations, as an open, extensible, cybersecure offering designed to work across any enterprise.
Q.: What benefits can Industry 4.0 projects bring to a company’s business?
A.: Uygar Doyuran: Think of all the devices and assets that companies use to perform their daily operations, from the machines on the factory floors, vehicles, security measures, to building systems such as heating, ventilation, security and fire systems. These assets sit at the “edge” of the enterprise and often interact directly with employees, occupants and customers– unlike core IT systems that exist on corporate servers.
The great thing about all these OT assets is the vast quantity of data they can generate. Take a modern airliner for example. It can generate more than half a terabyte of data per flight. The same goes for any operation – be it a logistics warehouse, a petrochemical plant or a shopping mall. But the future relies on these “things” – 50 billion devices by 2022 – becoming more connected and integrated with IT assets. Without this connectivity, physical devices add little value in their own silos. It’s the combination of intelligence, computing capacity and software that is at the heart of Industry 4.0.
So what does this mean in a practical sense? Consider the processing plant operator who can see exactly where, in a vastly complex infrastructure, small adjustments can be made to reduce system fatigue by identifying and adjusting loads to reduce the risk of costly unplanned shutdowns through predictive maintenance.
Or the logistics warehouse that can use real-time data and AI to automatically optimize goods picking based on distance to travel and order priority, in order to select, sort, and distribute more products per day, with greater accuracy, improving productivity and thus profitability.
There is also the potential to increase the safety of workers operating in challenging environments, by monitoring ambient and body temperatures, step counts, lift loads and even vital signs, to ensure in real-time that workers are operating safely.
And then, in an example that is particularly applicable right now, there is the potential to monitor building parameters to intelligently manage building access based on occupant utilization, track air quality metrics and increase ventilation, and even remotely check body temperatures and adherence to policies such as mask wearing, to help keep building occupants safe during the pandemic.
Post-Covid, companies need to be able to return to growth as quickly as possible. They need to be faster, more efficient and more accurate in everything they do within their operations, because they cannot afford to miss out on growth opportunities or get weighed down by excess costs.
Industry 4.0 is the enabler of that. Our connected, always-on world is making it easier for companies to operate in a leaner, more profitable way to help them return to growth in the wake of the pandemic. Connected technology will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in the world’s journey to economic recovery.
---
Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn