As you know, CESMII is focused on accelerating and scaling the implementation of Smart Manufacturing (SM) systems in the US. As part of this strategy, the CESMII team believes that the next generation of manufacturing software needs to enable application interoperability. 

Over the last 12 months, CESMII leaders have been visiting manufacturing facilities for day-long Smart Manufacturing workshops.

In these sessions, the CESMII leadership team showcases the capabilities and requirements of SM and a roadmap to implement it. In an effort to expand the reach of the workshop, we created a virtual session to provide a deep dive into the fundamentals of interoperability, modern OT/IT-friendly platform architectures, open specifications, and interfaces enabled by information models, data standards/standardization, the importance of a graph database, the global standards landscape for smart manufacturing, and more.

The full workshop can be viewed here.  For this month’s session, we’ve invited our workshop presenters to come together and answer live Q&A from our audience.

Top 5 Takeaways

1. Whether you are making software or using it to improve your manufacturing systems, the SM approach has three common themes – they are: 1. the protocol doesn’t matter, 2. the data needs to be modeled, and 3. interoperability is the key.

2. When challenged to convey the SM philosophy to partners – technology, SIs, machine builders, etc. – CESMII is here to help. Industry won’t change with new technology alone, in fact there’s a lot of work that goes into demonstrating strategic value internally and externally. Invite your partners to be part of the CESMII ecosystem and get educated together. We take your unique business challenges into consideration and recommend CESMII tools to help improve your total business.

3. The industrial space has been slow to give openness and interoperability the buy-in it needs. A major industry shift will only be possible once leaders begin to advocate for it. The good news is that today the SM technology, platform, and tools are ready for the shift, we just need manufacturing leaders and the ecosystem to mature around it.

4. Every project justification and use case brings with it the decision to stay on with the status quo or go down a new path. We challenge you to reconsider using the Industry 3.0 approach and start looking at Smart Manufacturing concepts where you can achieve new business outcomes to solve various challenges using the same architecture.

5. Engage and be part of the CESMII SM transformation. The industry is being given the unique opportunity to work broadly across organizations to solve problems in a more collaborative way than ever before. The time is now!