Co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant add to Razorleaf’s series exploring digital twins with Stay Sharp Episode 86, Unpacking Digital Twin Series: MES IIOT. To focus on what components are essential for building valuable digital twins, they’re joined by Dan Miklovic, a veteran of the industry with more than 50 years’ manufacturing experience in physical plants, corporate engineering, R&D, and analysis/research. Together, the trio examines exactly how product manufacturers get the data they need to build digital threads and digital twins.
Critical Components for Twins and Threads
They start the discussion with the idea that much of what organizations will need for their twins and threads will come from manufacturing systems, since those contain “all the things you need to do and the equipment you need to employ to deliver that thing you’re trying to deliver,” Jonathan says. Dan describes the basic technology stack inside a manufacturing organization: instruments and devices at the bottom, systems that control them in the middle, and a supervisory control layer at the top.
The middle layer became known as manufacturing execution systems (MESs), he says, “the electronic systems that allowed you to intercommunicate between all of these elements … the MES automated that.” An industry organization developed standards that existing MES systems lacked, and the systems that followed became manufacturing operations management systems (MOMs). “MES grew out of shop floor control. MOM grew out of MES. Can an MES have all the functionality of a MOM or most of it? Yeah,” Dan explains. “Can a MOM system do everything an MES system could? Sure. Today it’s more a preference of terms.”
IIoT (industrial internet of things) devices are the enabler for gathering the information that MES and MOM systems work with. “Think of the MES and the MOM as the loom. It’s where the threads get woven together,” Dan says. “The MES knows what product is supposed to be being made, it knows what product is currently being made, and it knows how it’s being made. It brings all of that together.”
Gathering the Right Data
The instruments and devices at the bottom of the manufacturing tech stack have now become IIoT, because every sensor and piece of hardware is connected. Jonathan notes, “With IIoT, now data’s accessible to be used in a twin, and that’s a component we’re going to care about from the manufacturing process.”
While the information that’s being generated and gathered isn’t new, in the past it was labor-intensive and error prone. IIoT devices plus today’s internet-enabled environment allow manufacturers to quickly and accurately create an as-built record and bill of materials. That improves your digital twins, because you can record what is actually made—making your product definition significantly more accurate. Dan adds that timeliness is every bit as critical as accuracy. While you used to get the paperwork defining the product and its build at the very end of a delivery, he says, “Now with IOT and the use of these MES and MOM systems to get that information into your product design systems and your product management systems—PLM, PDM, as well as ERP—you can understand exactly what that product looks like at this instant, even if it’s not complete.” Real-time data also means you know your components are all the right quality and serial numbers. He notes, “Because MES and MOM systems have not only impacted the quality of the data, they’ve actually impacted the quality of the products.”
Why You’re Making Digital Twins
This means the data an organization collects gives them not only a product digital twin, but also a process digital twin and a twin of the specific process that made that product instance. “A digital twin is not so much a thread. It’s more like a digital fabric or tapestry because it’s all these threads woven together is what gives you the digital twin,” Dan says. “The whole point of the twin is in essence to do process modeling. You’re trying to model what you’re doing.” Doing so helps you optimize all the ways in which you could save money, improve sustainability efforts, and much more.
Learn More About the Value of Twinning the Process
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including how to get your data from MES, MOM, and IIOT systems into digital twins; how digital twins can help manufacturers deal with potential changes due to tariffs; why Dan says you shouldn’t pay attention to industry 4.0, but just keep making steady progress; what the first and most fundamental rule of information technology is; and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 86: Unpacking Digital Twin Series: MES IIOT and join us each week for a new podcast.
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