In the March cover story on the digital journey of a food and beverage facility, we looked primarily at planning and executing a successful implementation of digital techniques to improve processes, make them more efficient and glean actionable information from them. We also looked at plant and device-level networking (the backbone of a successful transformation) and company culture (especially the IT-OT face-off) and considered whether the digitalization journey required a “rip-and-replace” of sensors, networking, controllers and other equipment.
Fortunately, there are several options to rip-and-replace, and we began to look at an overlay approach, which means keeping what’s in place and adding new sensing and data concentrating devices that can be used separately from the existing sensor networks. I’d like to pick up at this point and delve into more detail on sensors, then look at what applications can make use of this data (e.g., MES, ERP, etc.) and present it to those who need it in ways that make the most of this information to each user.