Sunday, December 2, 2007

OMAC's future The manufacturing engineering group at The Boeing Co. was a perfect host to the first annual OMAC Integration Symposium. The event was held at the Future of Flight facility at Boeing in Everett, WA. One of the highlights was definitely a tour of the assembly building where the new 787 Dreamliner aircraft is assembled. We also saw the 777 assembly line and part of the 767 line. Billed as "Bridging the Gap between the Discrete and Process Industries," perhaps the closest presentation on that topic came from Dan Seger. He's co-chair of the ISA SP88 part 5 committee and a principal engineer at Rockwell Automation. His presentation was a clear and informative picture of how the committee has taken the work reflected in ISA88 (Batch process standard) and expanded it to be generic enough to encompass discrete (machine) automation as well as process and batch. ISA88 part 5 is known as Make2Pack or more formally Modular Concepts for Automated Systems. The focus of work was on standard states and names for equipment modules and control modules. Another objective was to push object oriented programming. The draft document is out to the full committee for review, with the committee vote expected in mid-2008 and ISA adoption as a standard hoped for before the end of the year. The significance of this work is that technology providers will feel comfortable building in templates and tools to help OEMs and other designers adopt the principles when this is a finished standard. Rockwell people have told me this several times. I had hoped to get Dan aside for a podcast interview during the two days, but they kept us so busy at the conference that we only had brief times to chat. A clear end user view of standardization came from a presentation by Rob Aleksa, an engineer with Procter & Gamble's corporate engineering group. Here are a couple of his arguments. If someone has designed something already, why should everyone have to reinvent it every time? Answer--develop standards to capture best practices. He also stated, "If you build on standards, then you have more time to innovate." P&G wants (listen up you OEMs) standard definitions of machine states, object-oriented programming and code that is encapsulated and placed in libraries. When asked about how P&G implements the strategy, Aleksa responded that you can't just spring the concepts on an OEM in mid-project. Engineers work with technology providers to educate OEMs on the value that standards adoption has for them. The presentations on the first day were primarily from Boeing engineers, and thus heavily CNC related. If I learned anything from this, it is that the state of the art for CNCs has advanced very little over the past many years. And reading between the lines of comments from some of the (unnamed) suppliers in attendance, I'd say there remains much resistance to bringing this technology into the 21st century. Bob Tain of Okuma did make a passionate plea for modernizing CNC controller technology--but then that's Okuma's competitive differentiator right now. One presentation that impressed me from the CNC portion did so because the ideas could be extrapolated into general use of standards. It's the old Aristotle argument of building from the specific to the general (rather than Plato's building from the general to the specific). Boeing's David Odendahl in "Swimming Upstream with Your Friends" talked specifically about the company's adoption process of the STEP NC standards. His points about how to get projects moving were instructive for us all.  Develop friends, avoid jargon, develop an effective "elevator pitch," get past the gatekeeper, be positive were his important points, but just as important was his passionate attitude. Decide the future An important part of the gathering got attendees (even me) involved in thinking about the future of OMAC. Boeing's Steve Olds explained and then led a "roadmapping" session where attendees thought about needs, solutions, products that OMAC could work on in the future. The ideas were compiled and sorted out, then we spent most of Thursday afternoon prioritizing them. The new OMAC board now has its work cut out. The next big symposium will be next November at Okuma in North Carolina. Congratulations to the new leadership. Now, we need more of you to get involved for the good of the industry. 2:25:13 PM    comment []