CIMdata had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Todd Earls, Vice President of Information Technology at Eaton, a global power management company doing business in over 175 countries. Mr. Earls leads an enterprise-wide digital design and manufacturing team that supports thousands of global users, including over 18,000 users of their core engineering data and process management systems and over 25,000 users of various mechanical computer-aided design (MCAD), simulation, application lifecycle management (ALM), virtual reality (VR), and the Internet of Things (IoT) tools, to name just a few categories of managed solutions. His team also supports over 300 manufacturing plants and various tools used by them.
This interview was conducted by telephone and edited for clarity.
What are some of the key product development/innovation issues faced by your company?
Connectivity relates to two major pillars of Eaton’s strategy, commercial IoT and Industry 4.0. This makes it a huge issue for Eaton. All of our products, and those of our competitors, are getting smarter. Beyond our own capabilities, we also need to build and manage an ecosystem of technologies to connect to the systems of others. We have a special team to address this need, all with the goal of making products (ours and those from others) easier to connect.
Beyond these technical topics, Eaton faces many of the same problems faced by industry more broadly. We have an aging workforce that must adapt to the rapid changes we all face, while also being the repository of critical knowledge that must be captured before it walks out the door as employees retire. We have to manage a wide range of disparate technologies for a global workforce that needs to communicate and collaborate rapidly. And the pace is picking up with things moving faster in a 24/7 engineering environment.
Do you have any programs/initiatives in place to address these issues? E.g., digitalization.
Our two digital pillars, Commercial IoT and Industry 4.0, provide a focus for our efforts. Each has a steering committee focused on defining and executing a set of projects that will help Eaton globally address these challenges.
What challenges do you face in selling digitalization and PLM internally?
For our Industry 4.0 Digital Initiative we sell it around business value. Everyone understands the need for connectivity and to make shop floors smarter. It is quantifying the value that is the biggest challenge. While technology is important, our work here is less about technology than it was 3-5 years ago. Defining technical projects is the easy part. But determining where best to start and calculating a value for those projects is much more difficult.
For Commercial IoT it is somewhat more complicated. Our competition is not sitting still and have their own initiatives and technologies. Beyond that there are a lot of different IoT platforms to consider. Today, for our Industry 4.0 initiatives, we rely on the IoT portfolio from PTC, including ThingWorx and Kepware.
How do you see the impact of simulation and optimization on your digitization efforts?
Strategically, we view simulation using two different lenses, adjacent and transformational. For example, we see our partnership with ANSYS and our other simulation providers as foundational. We use their tools and, mostly, have PhD’s to run them. This is foundational providing, if you will, the four walls of simulation.
When we say adjacent, we mean we want to overlay simulation with other tools to give designers real-time feedback. In this vein, we recently piloted ANSYS Discovery Live in our aerospace business, which mostly relies on CATIA for their core MCAD. We also made an initial purchase of PTC Creo with Creo Simulation Live embedded within it. We are also looking at leveraging high-performance computing (HPC) more routinely as these high-powered machines can reduce our analysis times from weeks to hours.
Transformation is about using existing tools and data in new ways. For example, how can we best take IoT data and bring that back to the MCAD environment to inform design activities? How can use do real-time simulation that builds on our IoT data to understand performance in the field? We see having that real-time feedback as being critical to our future success.
We are also planning on using simulation in our factories to better understand the geometry and physics of our machinery, and using data to predict machine failures. Eaton does not currently routinely use digital manufacturing solutions outside of a few Eaton businesses. However, we are considering their use as part of a manufacturing execution system (MES) deployment that is being planned.
We only expect our use of simulation to expand in the coming years. ANSYS has been a great partner to Eaton. In fact, ANSYS recently won one of two awards given by Eaton’s information technology (IT) group to outstanding Eaton IT partners. One main reason ANSYS gets such accolades is their work with us on their product roadmap. We feel we get to have real input into their roadmap decisions, including around new technologies. Of course, ANSYS does not cover everything and we rely on others to fill in any gaps in ANSYS’ coverage.
The digital twin is also very important at Eaton. But, of course, people have very different descriptions of what that means. For some it is about VR and augmented reality (AR), showing a representation of data on top of a real, physical product. For example, some of our test stands use the Microsoft HoloLens to view IoT sensor data superimposed on the product being physically tested. This is about the numbers that summarize operational performance. You can plug in a machine and access sensor data to understand the baseline for that equipment.
Others use a more physics-based definition of the digital twin, where the virtual representation is kept up to date with the physical as it moves from design to manufacturing to the field. This is on our radar and is of interest to us but not a priority today.
One reason why companies move in this direction is to support a product-as-a-service business model. While I am familiar with this idea from my time in aerospace with phrases like “power by the hour” the notion is not widespread at Eaton today to my knowledge. It is being pursued in our commercial pump business, one focus area for our IoT strategy. Today, you can sell a customer products and get a one-time sale. Or we can install products, monitor them using IoT, and every day it is up and working to specs you pay us for.
Can you comment on simulation process and data management, simulation driven data science applications as key enablers for democratization of simulation?
Simulation process and data management (SPDM) is important to Eaton. We currently have a project around additive manufacturing (AM) that is running a Proof of Concept pilot of ANSYS Minerva (their recently announced new SPDM platform built on top of Aras Innovator). There are many steps necessary to design and manufacture parts using AM processes. We are looking at using ANSYS Minerva to help make the user experience more streamlined that it is today.
This is part of a larger enterprise-wide AM initiative, which includes an AM Center of Excellence (CoE) which supports all Eaton businesses. Since we use a range of MCAD solutions across our many businesses, some of them are trying to dictate which MCAD solution to use. Overall, we are trying to standardize on using Creo with ANSYS Minerva to support AM design.
What challenges/issues do you face? Concerns like security, bandwidth, data lock in, managing hybrid environments; possibly migration
For a company like Eaton, our biggest challenge is our breadth. Across our four major business units, it is difficult to count how many different divisions we have, each with their own engineering leads. While it can be easy to get started with a certain group, expanding that success across the company can rapidly lead to a 15 year roadmap. A lot of projects and initiatives are brought to our central group for consideration. But to standardize on a set of tools is a huge organizational change management challenge.
Our businesses are very different. Some will have 100 plants making mostly the same product. But we have many, many products that form a very diverse set. This provides its own set of unique challenges.
What benefits/positive aspects of your digitalization or digital transformation do you expect?
For our work around Industry 4.0 we are tracking a few key metrics. For example, the cost of non-conformance and quality are key. Better product quality starts with digital design. On-time delivery is another one. We are looking to make our manufacturing processes more seamless. We are also looking to better measure the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). We can use IoT to help understand the reasons our equipment goes down and move towards using predictive maintenance helping to ensure improvements in on-time delivery.
In engineering we are looking at the costs of engineering and speed to market. To address our aging workforce, we are looking to increase automation of certain tasks and to reuse parts or other work done previously.
What is your general timeline for deployment?
As said previously, this is a long-term effort. We plan to continue expansion of our digital capabilities. Our Industry 4.0 team selected PTC’s ThingWorx earlier this year and we already have projects in 15 plants, and plan to deploy this solution to 45 plants in the next three years. The progress and deployment of these digital capabilities vary widely by use case and plant.
We will continue to enhance our foundational capabilities. About 75% of Eaton is on ENOVIA and we will continue to work to consolidate to one standard PLM solution. We will also identify more adjacent use cases and to automate some design needs with a layer of more digital tools on top of them. All of this will be assessed on its potential return on investment.
Thanks Mr. Earls, this was a very informative conversation. Good luck in your on-going digital transformation journey.
