BobLfoot

ITAM {Information Technology Asset Management} and the OT {Operational Technology} World

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Fellow Automation Gurus, Controls and Electrical Engineer and anyone in the field.  For years there has been an ongoing love/hate relationship between the IT Department and the Plant Floor Process or Maintenance Folks.   The most recent iteration of this was the coining by some of the terms IT {Information Technology} and OT {Operational Technology} to differentiate between the two.  Unless you've buried your head in the sand the device of the IT world are more and more prevalent on the Plant Floor whether it be PC based HMI or Quad Core and higher PAC Units.  Most recently ISO / IEC 19770-1:2017 came out establishing Asset Management Best Practices.  Now I know that Rockwell has its Installed Base Evaluation initiatives and Schneider Modicon does similar work.  I'm curious to learn if anyone is implementing Asset Management in the Plant Floor OT world and if so how is it going?

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I can only add some pains in our continuing journey. We have asset management for our plant floor devices but it's very old and not automated. We've had this due to regulations outside the IT standards you mention. We've known for a few years now that we need to upgrade to the current standards and it's been very slow.

You say love/hate relationship... try zero relationship at many facilities. That being said, a few years ago we established an internal department that consisted of an IT infrastructure specialist, software engineer, automation engineer, industrial engineer and a document control specialist. All senior positions with good experience. Keep in mind here that all of our implementations must be fully validated. There is a lot of pig wrestling going on but I believe we have (and are) making progress. It's very slow but we're learning a lot about each other's fields. That's very important. While we do have influence in our respective departments, it's difficult getting everyone on board. "We can't interrupt production!", "We must adhere to the regulations!", "We can't compromise Quality!", "Safety!", "Security!"... You know the drill.

There are a lot of aspects I could go on about. Our plant has probably something shy of a thousand devices. Devices that require some sort of controlled software. A lot of the machinery is very old, many different manufacturers, various software packages for maintenance, troubleshooting, backup, etc... We also have a lot new machinery coming in. (Sound familiar?) We've decided to start by standardizing our requirements for the new machinery. Considering we've worked with some vendors for many years providing us with tedious processes that work well for us, now we have to tighten their standards. We need the IT hardware infrastructure to support the floor. IT systems that support the protocols. Integration specifications at all levels. These things are not easy to specify up front. You have to consider the entire system when standardizing.

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