Welcome to another episode of Heat Treat Radio, a periodic podcast where Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, discusses cutting-edge topics with industry-leading personalities. Below, you can either listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or you can read an edited version of the transcript. To see a complete list of other Heat Treat Radio episodes, click here.
Audio: Cutting Edge Trends in Data: Peter Sherwin, Eurotherm by Schneider Electric
In this conversation, Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, discusses future trends in data with Peter Sherwin of Eurotherm by Schneider Electric. Learn more about coming trends in data collection, including bringing current technology to the heat treat world and cybersecurity.
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Transcript: Cutting Edge Trends in Data: Peter Sherwin, Eurotherm by Schneider Electric
The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.
DG (Doug Glenn): Data topics are not new to Heat Treat Radio. We’ve had multiple podcasts where we’ve talked specifically about data collection, data use, and data reporting. Jim Oakes, for example, from Super Systems Inc., spoke to us back in January of 2019 about heat treating data. Nathan Smith from C3 Data also spoke to Heat Treat Radio in September of 2018 about data and, more recently, George Smith and Daniel Graham from SBS Corporation spoke to Heat Treat Radio about heat treat data. There were several other interviews that we did that hit on data even though it wasn’t the main topic of the interview. You can access all of these previous episodes of Heat Treat Radio by Googling or Binging Heat Treat Radio, or by entering www.heattreattoday.com/radio into your browser. Today, however, we’re going to discuss future trends in data. Let’s jump into the interview with Peter Sherwin.
We are here today with Peter Sherwin from Eurotherm by Schneider Electric. Peter and I have known each other for a number of years, and he is one of my go-to guys for the latest in technology and advancements and trends in the heat treat industry, especially when it comes to data or process control, power control, temperature control and that type of thing. We want to talk about trends. Since we’re at the beginning of 2020, I thought we would spend some time with Peter talking about some trends and things of that sort. We have a couple of preliminaries to get out of the way though. First off, you are with Eurotherm by Schneider Electric. If you don’t mind, elevator pitch about Eurotherm and Schneider Electric and let us know what they do. Then I would like for you to brag about yourself for a moment and tell us a little about your background. Let’s start with Eurotherm first.
PS (Peter Sherwin): Eurotherm is now, for nearly 5 years, part of Schneider Electric whose overarching theme is energy and automation solutions. As far as Eurotherm, we specialize in precision temperature power and process control as well as data management solutions, particularly impacting things like operational efficiency of the heat treat plant and reducing the cost of complying to regulations. That’s really what we aim for.
From a personal view and background, to have an open conversation, these are my views. They may or may not be backed up by the views of Eurotherm and Schneider Electric, but it just gives me a bit of freedom to talk openly.
I’ve been with the industry for the past 30 years. I started in a captive heat treater called Reynold Chain in the UK and through my career have worked for different captive as well as commercial heat treaters and even a furnace OEM. But for just over 11 years, I’ve been working for Eurotherm. We are a supplier to the heat treat industry, and heat treatment is one of our key verticals and actually our largest vertical business within Eurotherm. Currently, I run that vertical globally, so I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to see heat treatment from different aspects across different cultures and regions.
DG: You are global. We should, in fact, say that your title is a global business development manager for heat treat. So you are ‘knee deep’ if not ‘waist deep’ in heat treat pretty much around the clock.
PS: I am. That’s my vertical. That’s my background. I grew up as a trained metallurgist and have taken that forward in my career. I still practice that now and again, so it’s very useful to have that background.
DG: You are global, in the true sense of the word, because before we turned on the record button, you were telling me about your upcoming trips to India, Thailand and wherever, so you’re out and about and do see a lot of things. For our listeners edification, your perspective, because you’re not just looking at the North American market, you can speak to some global trends and things of that sort which will certainly be impactful.
So, you and I ran into each other last at the ASM heat treat show in Detroit in October of 2019, just a few months ago, and you were gracious enough to have myself and a couple of our Heat Treat Today staff people over to talk about some of the latest things Eurotherm is doing. I would like to start by asking you about those things. Talk about some of that stuff that’s going on and then we can dig deeper into some of the trends as we go forward. Tell us about what Eurotherm is, in fact, doing with some of the data acquisition and whatnot.
PS: It’s really expanding from the base of having devices that can capture data, whether its a PID controller or a data recorder, and then being able to do more with that information to really have an impact on operational efficiency. I think we demoed a few different platforms to you. We have to look more at cyber security these days with any kind of offer, so that’s kind of wrapped into any of the solutions that we provide today. But we look to predictive maintenance solutions. I think I demonstrated a health app on one of the machine advisor programs. We looked at the way that we can now control and manage energy much better with energy SCADA systems and we even had OEM furnace solutions where you could tie in the expertise of an OEM to the end users to give them online access to certain information so they can actually provide better service. And from a shop floor perspective, I think one of the solutions that caught a bit of buzz at the show was the augmented reality solution where you can use a tablet in front of a furnace, hold it up and through the camera you’re actually getting live information about what’s happening on that furnace. You can actually access documentation directly like electrical diagrams. It just makes the whole process of being able to maintain and operate a furnace much more efficient. So just a few of the solutions that we talked about.
DG: Yes, all very fascinating and very impressive.
Heat Treat Today has done several past podcasts on process controls and trends in data, data acquisition, and things of that sort. We talked with Jim Oakes from Super Systems, we’ve talked with Nathan Wright from C3 Data, and we’ve even talked with two gentlemen from SBS Corporation, George Smith and Daniel Graham, about some of their systems and all of them had a lot of very interesting things to say. But historically, a lot of the data collection that has gone on has been specifically for process validation, but I think almost all of these gentlemen, and I think including yourself, I’d like to get your comment on this, they see a lot of data collection now because of the volume of data we can take going beyond process validation. What are your comments about that?
PS: I think it’s quite useful to understand why we collect data for the process and then because of that we can expand it for use in other applications to have an impact on operational efficiency. Just taking the point about validating the process. So heat treatment is part of one of the so-called special processes because it has the ability to impact a part’s physical integrity and induce stresses within a component. And it’s in a class of thermal treatments, chemical treatments, and mechanical treatments that can actually do this. But because you don’t then test after the treatment for those stresses, and because that is more difficult and costly, you have to be very sure about how you process. So that means that you need qualified personnel, approved equipment, defined procedures and also have some verification of those procedures and the process that the parts have gone through. At the core of it, it’s very important that you’ve got very good data integrity for just validating the process. One thing at Eurotherm that we’re quite lucky and fortunate about is that we do work in other industries. One of the other industries is the life science industry and requiring to work for FDA standards means that you have to follow processes such as ALCOA+. Now, that’s not the company, it’s an acronym about how you actually capture and store and attribute the data to make sure that you’ve got that level of integrity throughout the process of data management. It’s something that with certain key clients we go a little bit deeper than the AMS 2750 standard or the CQI9, as far as being able to catch full audit trails to ensure that you’ve got that good data capture. If you’ve got that good data capture, you can then move forward with that to be able to use it for other areas, and that is where we get into operational efficiency and also having an impact on quality. From my perspective, I’ve been with the industry for the last 30 years and I’ve seen this trend. Thirty years ago, it was very much operator heavy. You could be one on one with an operator and a machine and the machines were either manual or semi-automated; they were not full automated like the furnaces that we’ve got today. So there was a lot of training of operators and different skill levels that you needed back in, say, the 90’s. As time has moved on, those processes have become more automated and they have operators running multiple machines. For them to be able to do that, we’ve got to present information in a way where if they’ve only got a few seconds or a few minutes at a furnace, they can really pick up the detail of what’s happening. That’s where we start to get into operational efficiency to effect how we use labor within a heat treatment department.
The other interesting trend as we’ve moved through the decades has been the development of regulations such as AMS 2750 and CQI9. There have been more requirements for tests and task tracking. We’ve actually needed additional QA personnel or resource to counter that requirement and make sure that we comply with those regulations. And that’s also for some technology solutions. I think that’s what Nate was talking about in his podcast about his platform trying to reduce the cost of compliance regulations. And we do the same.
DG: Regarding standards, what do you see coming in the near future for the heat treat market? What’s relevant?
PS: Relevant for the heat treaters today is what’s coming this year with the update of the standards of AMS 2750 that will go to F version, due sometime in the summer, and also CQI9 issue 4. That will come earlier, maybe just after the first quarter. Obviously, we look at these standards. We have a number of people that are on the ballot or have some involvement with the standards, and the feedback is this move from being in a paper environment to paperless. Electronic records is going to be big for both of those standards. They are going to give heat treaters some time to actually move if they do currently still use paper. But ultimately, over the next 2 or 3 years, you’ll see pretty much all heat treaters using electronic records and digital paperless systems because that’s the requirement of the standards.
DG: Maybe jump into a little bit more of the operational efficiencies. Is there anything more that we can say about that? Are there any trends that you’re seeing on how data and data management is going to help us with operational efficiencies?
PS: Quite an interesting trend with a subject called Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). This is a KPI (key performance indicator). I don’t think it’s widespread currently within the heat treatment industry, but I see it in pockets when I travel around the world. OEE is made up of three components, the first being up-time (the the availability of the furnace), second component being the cycle time, so where are you against the design performance that you might have got from the furnace OEM for how fast and well that cycle should run. And the third component is quality-how many parts do you get through right first time without needing to go back through any rework or even get into rejects. So now there is a bit of a push of, ok, so how can we use technology solutions to help companies improve their OEE? It used to be just on the manufacturing floor, but it’s now migrating a bit more to the heat treatment department, so this is something that we’ve looked at what we can do. We’re fortunate to be part of the larger Schneider Electric and we can rely on some of their resources and we’ve been able to tap into platforms that already offer OEE type solutions. So that is something that we’re seeing as a trend and something that we have solutions for, and I think it’s going to be a topic for this year.
DG: You mentioned OEE, up-time, cycle-time, and quality. I assume that built into that also is equipment utilization, right? It’s not just that the equipment is up (as in not broken down), but also in use, correct? Are we minimizing the gap times between loads, assuming it’s a batch system?
PS: Yes. It’s actually quite specific on up-time. It ignores plant maintenance because it kind of says, you have to do that to have a good running department, but it does concentrate on maybe three areas. Furnace breakdowns, so if you have something unexpected that happens. It also looks at waiting times, and that can be split into waiting times from a labor perspective, have you got the resources to actually run the furnace, or are you getting gaps because of that? And it could be fixtures or parts, so what you’re going to load into the furnace, are all of those ready, or are you waiting on those because you’re waiting on your customer or are you waiting on a pre-process? So, yes, it looks at all of those areas and identifies where those gaps are. It shows you where you’re getting trends, maybe a trend from one shift to another, so you can actually look at taking action to resolve that because it’s very valuable, the up-time of a furnace.
DG: Let’s talk about AI, analytics, machine learning and impact on things like preventative maintenance and, to a certain extent, this effects operational efficiency as well because we’re talking up-time on equipment. What are you hearing? What are you seeing?
PS: I capture a lot of this in the bubble of IoT and Industry 4.0 solutions. There are a lot of buzz words out there. There is a lot of hype, I think, over the past few years. Now some of that hype is starting to manifest itself into real solutions, but I think those have really only come out over the past couple of years. So what we do in this space is we have some predictive maintenance solutions that include a health application. Pretty much out of the box, you have data coming into an algorithm and it gives you information about the health of that particular asset. You can track that over time and so it can give you an indication of when you’re starting to get a problem, it may be on a component level on a furnace, or it may be across the entire furnace itself, but it gives you some kind of prediction so you can take action before something fails. If I go back a year or so, you kind of had to build discrete models to make this happen, and the result was as good as the model that you built. I think those have improved and they’re a bit more user friendly. And this is just going to improve over time. So I think predictive maintenance is going to be a topic that we’ll start to see having an effect this year and, as time goes on, the value of that will just increase.
DG: I know there are several different furnace and/or induction equipment companies in the industry that already have preventative, predictive maintenance programs out there. Do you think that’s going to continue to grow? Are we going to see more and more of that?
PS: Yes, without a doubt. And, in fact, one of the packages that we put together allows an OEM to provide those services to their end users. You’ve got different tiers of OEM that some can afford to invest, which is quite a substantial amount in actually providing these types of solutions. Others, not so much. There are platforms now out there that enable all OEMs to kind of jump on the bandwagon of predictive maintenance and be able to offer those remote services.
One of the areas that will come out this year, just to give you a sneak peak of it, is based on the augmented reality aspect. We already have an augmented reality solution. We work with a number of OEMs with that, but the technology has evolved to the extent [that] you can pick up a tablet, hold it up against the furnace, and [it] give[s] you valuable information about the running characteristics of that furnace. You can pick documentation up and electrical drawings, all from that tablet, all live. But what we will be able to do in 2020 is also get a remote view from an OEM actually dialing directly into that tablet and seeing what that person on the shop floor is actually seeing in front of them and being able to give them far better advice and better direction in case they’re trying to sort out an issue, to hopefully resolve that issue in a much faster time as well as cut down the cost of traveling all the time to site.
DG: Your interaction with the furnace manufacturers and/or induction equipment manufacturers, in fact you cooperate with them to help provide these systems to their end users as well.
PS: It is because of this other trend that we’ve seen with the workforce, particularly in North America. You’ve got quite a large set of baby boomers that have been retiring over the past few years and that is coming to an end, and then you’ve got millennials coming in with completely different skills. They are very tech-savvy, so some of these new solutions that we’re offering, they can get on board and get up to speed very quickly, but they lack the experience that the baby boomers have had because some of the guys and girls in the industry have been working for like 30, maybe even 40 years. They’ve amassed all of this experience and certainly that can potentially go out the business. So we’re using some of this technology to take hold of some of that expertise and augment the knowledge that the younger engineers have so that they can get up to speed a lot quicker.
DG: The younger generation are much more comfortable with a smartphone than a furnace, but if you can put some of that knowledge about the furnace on that smartphone, voila, you’ve got yourself a more quickly trained younger generation.
PS: The side effect of that is also having modern technology within a furnace department, you can start to then attract some of these younger engineers. Because if you don’t have that, there are opportunities for them elsewhere in different industries and higher technology. So we’re all competing for a limited labor pool, and updating the technology is going to have an impact on you being able to employ people a lot easier.
DG: We did a Heat Treat Radio interview with the CEO of the Inductotherm Group, a gentleman by the name of Gary Doyan. I asked him this same question. I said, “So is all the hype about Industry 4.0, is it true?” I think that the issue he got to was, just because you can collect the data doesn’t mean you ought to collect the data. That brings me to the question: There is so much data out there; what do we do with it? Just because we can collect it, should we? And what are we going to do with all the data? How do we assimilate it? How do we make sense out of it?
PS: Let me rewind the clock a little bit to when I first started in the industry and you had manual process cards. Not a lot of paper chart recorders around, and those that were around were probably just logging the temperature rather than any other data point. That has really changed. From the 2000s onward, you’ve had paperless charts within the industry, SCADA systems, a lot of information. So you’ve gone from this scarcity of data to data overload. As you’re trying to do more and more with operational efficiency, we’re just getting more and more data points. We’re fortunate, in a way, and I think Jim mentioned this on his call, that with the PLCs, etc., and the other devices we have on the shop floor, we’re collecting that data anyway. So it’s not so much the issue about capturing data, it’s been about we’ve got this massive data, we’ve got this potential overload, we don’t have the time, resources, and even sometimes the expertise to make sense of all of this information, so where do we go from here? I think this is another trend that we’re seeing. It developed in 2019, and it’s going to continue — the use of dashboards. I believe Nate touched on this as well in his interview. If you can collect that information and collate it and put it into a format that is just easy to understand and quick to get a view about what’s happening, what’s happened, what’s the direction, you can make better and quicker decisions. We see dashboards and dashboarding as a trend that’s going to just explode, as far as in the heat treatment department because you need to be able to provide that information in a better way. An example of that is what we discussed about OEE. OEE comes with its own dashboard to give you a quick view about what’s happening across your process. That’s another trend for 2020.
(Photo Credit: Eurotherm)
DG: Yes. Actually making sense of the data in bite size, quick pictures. Two more questions. I always have to ask this because I think everybody wants to know about it: cyber security. A lot of these systems that we’re talking about are either cloud-based or they have some vulnerability to outside intrusion. Can you talk a bit about any type of trends you’re seeing in cyber security?
PS: This is interesting. I started looking at all the IIOT and Industry 4.0 stuff back in 2013 and the trend for 2013–2018 was ‘what’s possible?’ What’s possible with the cloud, and with these edge devices, etc.? The last two years, you’ve then moved into ‘what’s practical?’ Because we’ve seen a lot of these cyber security issues, even within our own industry, where you’ve had furnace OEMs and end users get involved with ransomware situations, not necessarily directed at the process control layer, but more targeted to ERP systems, etc., and you could get these potential viruses through USB connections, emails coming in where you click on one of those emails and then you open up this door for hackers to come through. So it has certainly become more of an issue. We were quite early in looking at this from an industrial product point of view, and we looked at starting to harden devices to enable them to withstand cyber security attacks. The latest range of controllers, the EPC3000 range, have a level of cyber security built in. They meet what’s called an Achilles Level One standard. We are also looking, even with our legacy products, to improve their cyber security requirements and try to meet some of the requirements from this international standard IEC62443. That is being built up to try and improve the safety, availability, integrity, and confidentiality of all of the components and systems that you’ve got within your plant. We, as well as Schneider Electric, have followed that, and it’s interesting to see the resource requirements that have gone from pretty much when we’re dealing with products in the past, there was very little talked about or even planned with cyber security, to it now being the number one. This leads everything. We have to have our software development life cycle start with cyber security. So, yes, it’s accelerated and it’s right. If you open up these ports for people to come in, it can work both ways. Obviously, you’re pushing information out, you can spread information across the plant, everyone gets to know what’s going on, but you can then have other people coming in that you don’t want. You’ve got to be a little bit more careful.
Very simple things I would promote to any heat treater today, and that is start looking at manage switchers and firewalls for your operation. We do have white pages on this that actually go through some of the rudimentary things that you should do from a cyber security perspective. I’m happy for people to contact me or maybe we can give you something, Doug, that you can put up on your website so they can just access it.
Editor’s Note: Click on “White Paper” image to be linked to the white paper referred to in this section.
DG: Yes, that would be good to do. We could at least put a link over to your site so people can look at those white papers. I think that would be helpful.
I’ve got a final question for you, and it’s regarding your average every day heat treater, manufacturer of some product, aerospace, automotive or whatever, who has his own in-house heat treat shop. Let’s say they’re not doing a lot right now with IIOT, how would they get started? What would be your suggestion on how to get rolling on using data more effectively, if you will?
PS: There’s got to be a purpose, and that purpose usually is to have an effect on, say, something like operational efficiency. Trying to assess where they are now and where they want to get to and using something like overall equipment effectiveness, it is down to a KPI so you can get a percentage. You’ve got people that are world class that are like 85%, so the average is around 60%, and you’ve got some laggers that are around 40% as far as OEE. So getting that benchmark of where you are, getting an aspiration of where you want to be, and then contact anyone, like an instrument supplier that is touching on the IIOT world, like Eurotherm or others that are out there to help you on that journey. There is a lot of support. There are a lot of offers out there now that have all come up over the last couple of years. So don’t hesitate to reach out. There are people that know about this stuff and that can help, and they do want to sell it to you! Don’t be afraid of picking up the phone or sending an email because people are out there to support you. If the heat treat business as a whole improves, then everyone improves. That should be how people focus on things.
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