EIF 2023 Review – MESA

ARC’s European Industry Forum, part of the successful series of worldwide conferences in Europe, America and Asia, has been held in Sitges (Barcelona), Spain on May 15 - 17, 2023. The event offered exclusive presentations and workshops on strategies and case studies in line with this year’s topic “Managing Industry Evolution in Times of Global Disruption” to its 160 international participants from 20 countries.

MESA Session at the ARC Europe Forum
The session was hosted in collaboration with MESA Europe and provided a platform for users to testify, and for MESA to create awareness about its activities that support design and implementation of operations management solutions.

Among the many interesting discussions was the call to action by Steve Hewitt from Rockwell Automation in the UK. He requested practitioners to collect data about benefits obtained from operations management applications, such as shorter onboarding time from extended reality applications, reduced variability from quality control, etc. ARC believes this is a useful initiative, and we recommend users to contact Steve if they have information on benefits to share.

Scibotron
Josh Paddy, of Scibotron in South Africa, was distinguished by MESA Africa for the best presentation at their annual event. Ricardo Paddy, Scibotron’s CEO, presented it at ARC’s European forum, explaining that extended reality (XR) is a real-time continuum between reality and digital realms. The digital world is modeled on the real world and updated with real-time information from the real world and can be considered a digital twin. However, it is more, as it can add operator instructions to reality or operator feedback from reality.

Industrial applications of XR are built using a lifecycle approach using rapid prototyping and design, including combinations of functionalities such as remote access, virtual inductions, simulated training, and real-time monitoring and control. Once commissioned, they must be maintained and supported. Scibotron showed a movie illustrating XR providing instructions on operating a manifold connected to several vessels with different fluids, to make a mixture, as part of a recipe. The application was simple while insightful and the audience could appreciate this application was likely to yield a short payback. The community designing, operating operations management applications can be confident that XR is mature enough to be part of the technologies to use to respond to user needs.

MESA
Uwe Küppers, from Kalypso and chairman of the board of EMEA Europe, provided insights about the application of the new MESA model in industrial operations to come to business results. The new MESA model considers “cross-lifecycle” digital threads, that is, uninterrupted flows of information connecting business processes, production and other systems, products, supply chains, workforce, financials, and equipment throughout their respective lifecycles. For each of those elements, topical threads, such as quality, compliance, or maintenance detail different aspects of each main thread. They are intertwined because applied technologies can server multiple topics and threads.

As an example, operations management applications may be able to handle both maintenance thread throughout the lifecycle of the production assets and quality thread throughout the lifecycle of the product. The MESA model can help thinking systematically when designing or reworking applications. Mr. Küppers gave examples of possible applications: reducing finished production losses by predicting and monitoring deviations from normal operating conditions using predictive and prescriptive operator guidance, and dynamic, closed-loop, scheduling in operations.

The MESA organization continues to work on detailed descriptions of the lifecycles, cross-lifecycle threads, and use cases. The organization provides education, networking and resources for practitioners.

ARC’s European Industry Forum & Platform

We like to thank our sponsors, who supported the ARC EIF 2023, and all our speakers and presenters, who made the event interesting, exciting and memorable.

To complement the Forum, ARC Europe offers its online platform https://arc-industry-forum-europe.arcweb.com/en/, accessible 365 days a year. Its goal is to maintain the flow of information, and to foster network opportunities. On the platform you will find information concerning relevant economic developments and information on automation markets, as well as our quarterly industry webinars.  

Materials and presentations from the Forum will be made available on our platform https://arc-industry-forum-europe.arcweb.com/en/ after registration, depending on the package chosen. Forum attendees can download presentation slides, view video recordings and receive further materials on the platform.

For more information, please contact Ann-Kathrin Blech (mailto:ablech@arcweb.com).