Lexmark’s newly announced Optra IoT platform for manufacturers originated in the company’s need for performance improvements through harnessing data collection in its own printer manufacturing operations.
Sudhir Mehta, global vice president for digital transformation at Lexmark, headquartered in Lexington, Ky., discusses the company’s ready-made Optra IoT platform and its value to all types of manufacturers.
Manufacturing Engineering: Sudhir, please give us a little background on Lexmark and what drove the investment in Optra.
Sudhir Mehta: As a world leader in print and imaging as well as managed print services, Lexmark is an incredibly technology-focused company. For many companies, a printer is often their original shared, connected device. In addition to printers and supplies, we provide cloud-based print management services to manufacturing companies, retail businesses, financial institutions, and healthcare customers around the world. We are also a manufacturing company ourselves, so our need for harnessing, collecting, and analyzing data and driving outcomes from connected devices for improved performance was as compelling for us as for our customers.
ME: What are the advantages to a manufacturing organization with Optra?
Mehta: As we were building our own IoT platform, we looked seriously at what other OEM companies would value in connected services. A main goal is profitability and performance improvement—to drive desired outcomes from informed actions. Certainly, IoT—the Internet of Things—has tremendous appeal for manufacturing companies, but McKinsey says 84 percent of companies working on IoT are stuck in pilot mode. Compounding this situation is the vast amount of data that exists in silos across business applications and beyond the organization’s walls. Due to these complexities, uncovering actionable insights from the data is extremely difficult.
For years, our printers have been loaded with sensors that continuously monitor hundreds of data points, including alerts, internal diagnostics, and the device’s inner workings. We have optimized the performance of our printer ecosystem and achieved incredible results for our customers and ourselves, including resolving 70 percent of customer device-support issues remotely; increasing profitability by 25 percent via optimized utilization; and improving engineering efficiency by 30 percent. This focus also enabled us to add new as-a-service offerings to achieve a 40 percent in contractual or recurring revenue.
Too many IoT projects involve too much trial and error. Even if sensor data can be harvested from devices, it often cannot be combined with other key data sets from core business systems like customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, a necessary step to unlock actionable insights. Often, IoT pilots turn into science fair experiments starting with and focused on technology instead of a clear plan for successful business outcomes. This is where Optra solutions can really help to jumpstart and accelerate desired business outcomes for our customers and partners.
ME: Is there a “sweet spot” for the type or size of an Optra customer?
Mehta: We put a significant amount of effort into making Optra industry-agnostic. We’ve had tremendous interest from customers as varied as medical device makers, oil and gas processors and heavy-equipment manufacturers. One way we’ve viewed an average customer is “large enough for the need but small enough to require the help.”
Optra is a ready-to-deploy platform with prebuilt accelerators including algorithms, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models, reporting dashboards, and business process templates that fast-track insights, efficiencies, and time to value. A dedicated professional services team is also available to chart your path to business outcomes and accelerate success.
ME: How did Lexmark apply Optra in its own manufacturing operation?
Mehta: We pushed ourselves to find areas of our business we could further improve with data analysis. Manufacturing efficiency, asset management, systemic innovation and operating costs were clear opportunities. Our manufacturing system generates and saves large amounts of data from each printer and toner cartridge we make. Yet, we were not actively analyzing and extracting insights from it. This oversight and lack of knowledge-sharing was the first thing we looked to address.
For example, we have a chemical manufacturing process that produces toner for our cartridges. This process required regular manual inspections and adjustments to ensure that the chemical process was performing within desired parameters. These manual interventions yielded a wide distribution of cycle time variations that were introducing inefficiencies into upstream and downstream processes.
By analyzing multiple years of historical data, over hundreds of toner batches, we created in-process, machine-learning-based guidance for operators, lowered the frequency and duration of manual interventions, reduced cycle time variability to an acceptable range, and removed a major bottleneck to plant operations.
ME: Were there any bumps in the road resulting in lessons learned?
Mehta: Numerous. The transformation did not happen overnight. IoT efforts involve a significant internal culture shift. Driving device performance improvement involves focusing on data, building a platform that zeros in on outcomes, not a simple declaration of technical achievement. Building a connected IoT platform involved a complete realignment to ensure the focus was on the customer’s metrics. Change is hard, but it resulted in making Optra easier to integrate and manage from the customer’s point of view with connected devices and real-time data available when you need it. It confers: enhanced R&D and product design; optimized manufacturing quality and cycle times; improved quality assurance (QA) testing efficiency; and improved predictive demand planning.
Optra solutions include: Edge computing devices that securely moves applications out of the cloud and closer to the work, saving time and money with fewer servers and less infrastructure; a secure portal that remotely provisions and monitors hardware and software with updates available at a click of a button; a library of plug-and-play applications allowing customers to create custom workflows unique to their operation and customer requirements; and built-in Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi.
ME: You’ve built an IoT platform for your own use and out of your experience have packaged an IoT solution for customers. What’s your best advice for manufacturing companies looking to implement IoT?
Mehta: Keep an unrelenting focus on the business outcomes as opposed to being distracted by technical minutiae. Build a team culture that seizes opportunity for integration. Finally, be sure you consider a partner that can walk the entire journey with you.
GEDigital Releases iFIX Performance Automation Software
GEDigital, San Ramon, Calif., has announced upgrades to iFIX HMI/SCADA, its high-performance automation software, promising faster time to insight and greater efficiency for industrial operations, according to the company.
iFIX 2022 offers new capabilities to reduce time to solution, decrease total cost of ownership, and empower the connected worker. These enhancements include modeling improvements to support equipment variability, simplified browsing of PLC and control systems via OPC UA and IGS, and faster updates with the software’s Quick Installer. iFIX 2022 also reduces costs with improved single-server scale and supports cloud infrastructures to reduce hardware costs, centralize operations, and facilitate remote access for greater visibility and uptime.
iFIX 2022 from GEDigital
Subaru America uses iFIX to meet its goals of zero losses and improved efficiency, according to GEDigital. iFIX provides Subaru with visibility into real-time data, predictive analytics, genealogy, and tracking throughout the plant. The team has multiplied gains with deployments across the supply chain.
“We need our plant running with as much uptime as possible. We also are focused on quality and want the best cars getting to our customers—along with the flexibility to make changes such as paint color and trim,” stated Trent Lester, Group Leader for Integration of Production Control Systems, Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc. “We use GE automation software throughout the plant for collecting data and giving operators the ability to see things before they happen and give them more reaction time. It allows us to do a lot more tracking of vehicles and identify any issues throughout the process.”
Eiger from Markforged Adds Optimization
3D printer manufacturer Markforged, Watertown, Mass. acquired Teton Simulation Software (“Teton”), adding its SmartSlice technology that automates validation and optimizes part performance for additive manufacturing applications.
Automated validation is now part of Eiger software from Markforged.
Markforged will integrate Teton’s technology into its 3D printing software solution, Eiger, as a subscription add-on offering manufacturers, including small- and medium-sized businesses, a streamlined workflow spanning part design, testing, optimization, validation and printing at the point of need, all on a single, cloud-based platform. The acquisition enhances Markforged’s lead in distributed manufacturing by extending its end-to-end platform with fast, automated validation of the most demanding end-use parts and applications, according to the company.
SYSPRO Integrates ZAP Data Hub into ERP
SYSPRO USA, Tustin, Calif. recently announced a partnership with London, England-based ZAP, adding business intelligence and improved data management to SYSPRO’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities.
“With the SYSPRO ERP and ZAP Data Hub partnership, we provide manufacturing and distribution companies with an agile platform that offers new ways to strategically action priorities based on enhanced data,” said Sanjay Ejantkar, Vice President of Alliances, SYSPRO USA. “Since it is pre-integrated with SYSPRO ERP, customers can begin slicing data quickly, bringing forth the information and meaningful reporting that they need for improvement.”
ZAP Data Hub integrates effortlessly with SYSPRO ERP software, the company says, providing joint customers with a data warehouse pulling in SYSPRO data automatically using pre-defined ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) tools. Additionally, customers may import data from additional sources to improve the accuracy of insights gleaned from the data.
“ZAP is excited to bring a rich history of unlocking ERP data and delivering comprehensive, analytical insights to the SYSPRO partner and customer community,” said Trey Johnson, Senior Vice President of Americas—ZAP. “The value of having a SaaS-based, end-to-end data and analytics platform means access to data for decision making and insight, plus outcomes which accentuate the daily use of SYSPRO ERP Software.”
Velo3D Adds Large-Parts Support to Flow 3.0
Newly announced Flow 3.0 print-preparation software from Velo3D, Campbell, Calif. supports larger parts models produced on the company’s Sapphire XC (Extra Capacity) printers. Flow 3.0 also supports the scheduling of additional lasers to maximize the efficiency of the Sapphire XC’s eight 1,000W lasers, making the Sapphire XC up to 5× more productive compared to Velo3D’s Sapphire printer.
Flow 3.0 can process models of parts that are significantly larger to support the Sapphire XC’s increased build volume. The impeller above is approximately 600 mm in diameter.
Flow 3.0 print-preparation software enables engineers to simply upload a traditional CAD file of a part they want to print, rather than having to spend additional resources designing the part for additive manufacturing (DfAM). By eliminating the need for DfAM, Velo3D customers can freely design the mission-critical parts they want.
With Flow 3.0, the print-preparation software can reliably generate and leverage meshes of models containing up to hundreds of millions of triangles. This is made possible by offloading the computation of larger files to Amazon Web Services. The customer sends a CAD file and receives back a compacted file that can be used on any printer to build the part.
The software also includes revised scheduling rules to achieve 98 percent efficiency of the Sapphire XC’s eight lasers, further enhancing the XC’s productivity improvement.
High-Speed Robot Alignment Software from ABB
High-speed alignment software from Zurich-based ABB Robotics is the first to offer manufacturers the ability to increase the speed of six-axis robots by 70 percent and accuracy by 50 percent—significantly reducing time-to-market while increasing accuracy levels.
The PC-based software includes “visual servoing” technology, using one or more cameras combined with a computer vision system to control the position of the robot relative to the workpiece. As the robot is moving, the cameras continuously capture image information that the computer vision system processes to cross check and adjust robotic movements to deliver from 0.01 to 0.02-mm precision.
Liang Rui, managing director for ABB’s Robotics Electronics business line stated, “As [electronic] devices become smaller and more powerful, new automation solutions are required to quickly and accurately place components, ensuring production can keep pace with demand while maintaining the highest levels of product quality.”
ABB’s articulated six-axis robots are highly flexible for handling complex tasks in tight spaces and can perform a variety of meticulous placement tasks. The high-speed alignment software was developed to find the perfect balance between speed and accuracy.
Along with effortless commissioning and tuning, system integrators and manufacturers can benefit from a reduction in deployment time—down from an entire shift of eight hours to just one. Minimal programming experience is required, as the software is easy to use and has an intuitive user interface. Additionally, the software is compatible with a wide range of cameras, and IRC5 and OmniCore robot controllers, allowing system integrators to adapt existing installations.