ProSoft's “Phased Migration” Solutions - Control Design

Turf Battles and Finger-Pointing Have Caused Many Confl icts Between Control
Engineers and IT Staff . New Strategies and Tools Can Foster Cooperation That
Helps Keep Their Network Neighborhoods Cool
CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? Th at plea, fi rst from the late
Rodney King and later from the U.S. president played by Jack Nicholson
in “Mars Attacks,” is a long-sought and much-desired goal for control
and automation engineers, their IT counterparts and their companies.
It’s been quite a while since fi eldbuses, Ethernet, Internet, wireless
and other digital technologies began to encroach on
the plant fl oor’s traditional point-to-point networks for
operations and control, but engineers and IT still get on
each other’s nerves. Perhaps not as much at each other’s
throats as they once were, many remain highly resentful
and don’t work together well. As usual, culture takes far longer to
evolve than technology.
“We used to sit in project meetings with only the controls
guys, but in the past few years IT people started attending,
and it’s gotten better,” says Keith Jones, PE, president of Prism
Systems (www.prismsystems.com), a system integrator in Mobile,
Ala. “However, we were just in a meeting with a Fortune 500
manufacturer, and its engineers told us ahead of time to listen to
what IT was going say, but warned us not to agree right away to
do anything. They told us to wait, and the engineers would decide
if what IT wanted could be done. They had concerns, and wanted
to make sure they could override any IT requests, if needed.
Apparently, IT had previously pushed some Windows patches
onto the plant network without notifying the controls side, and it
had shut down some production lines. So the controls engineers
demanded that patches couldn’t be forced.”
12 INDUSTRIAL NETWORKING � Q3 � 2012
BY JIM MONTAGUE,
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
So, why didn’t these controls engineers and their IT counterparts
talk out these issues in the fi rst place? Why weren’t they straight with
each other in their meetings? And why didn’t they settle on mutually
understood patching policies and project requirements before
operational problems happened? Whatever the history and reasons
for these continuing squabbles, many managers are sick
of them, and are demanding that they stop. Fortunately,
there are a bunch of new strategies and tools for dividing
and coordinating network responsibilities to prevent
fi nger-pointing and settle these old confl icts.
START WITH LEADERSHIP
Th e primary initial element in getting controls engineers and IT
to cooperate is their managers. While these confl icts often were
ignored in the past, many leaders not only are requiring both sides to
cooperate, but are reorganizing them under common managers, and
developing hybrid engineers with both controls and IT skills.
Nagesh Nidamaluri, senior general manager at Mahindra Vehicle
Manufacturers (MVML, www.mahindra.com) in Mumbai, India,
reports that his company’s 14 greenfi eld auto plants and shops in 280
acres in Chakan, India, work with their IT departments to connect the
manufacturing execution system (MES) on its huge and expanding
plant fl oors to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
“We’re connecting all of our many varied components and
production equipment with IP addresses, which gives us the fl exibility
to be lean and expand as needed,” he explains. “Th is method