if you missed the OEE Application Deeper Dive Webinar, you can watch the replay here.
If you attended, thanks for joining us. You asked a lot of great questions. Here are the answers:
Once you have the OEE template in hand what are those steps that you need to take
to get the data from your from from your equipment into Losant? How can you really
leverage this template to customize it for your application?
One of the powerful things about Losant is we are device agnostic. If you have a device already in place we can connect
to it. You can connect to it through multiple different ways, you can use an edge compute device, which is what we
would likely use for a paper machine or you could even connect directly using MODBUS or OPC UA.
There are many ways to get the data to Losant and once it’s in the platform, we can perform any of the OEE calculations.
Losant dashboards can be configured to display exactly what you’re interested in seeing - and customize for specific
What specifically are the different ways that users can get data into Losant?
To provide some context about how data gets to Losant, the two magic words are HTTP and MQTT. However, that doesn’t quite explain how the interaction with PLCs happens. If you take a look at our Supported Protocol Documentation, the Losant Edge Agent allows you to install a tool in your environment that has access to the PLC data.
Losant supports the following protocols:
• MQTT
• HTTP
• Serial
• UDP
• Modbus
• OPC UA
• Allen Bradley
• BACnet
The Edge Agent allows you to tap into the PLCs because this Edge Agent is now within the same local network as those PLCs.
How could the same logic within the OEE template be scaled to other paper machines
or other machines that need the same OEE calculation?
This is where we can leverage the power of the context variables within our dashboards. Dashboards can take a series of “context variables” for changing not only what data to display within your blocks, but also how to display that data on a per-block basis. This makes it possible to set up a common dashboard that can display data specific to any device or attribute. So if you have a series of machines, either on the manufacturing floor, or across a geographic region, I can develop my dashboards to reference context variables so I am viewing data relevant to my needs.
When you consider how this template would actually be used on a manufacturing floor you want to be able to make decisions as close to as real time as possible. Maria gave that great example of “I’m a technician what is the key information that I need to see, so that I can get on with my day?” Anyone who has spent time on a manufacturing floor knows that its critical in terms of efficiency to be able to keep up that productivity.
I think being able to leverage Losant dashboards and context variables to identify not only the particular variable that is of most concern to a technician or an engineer but also to be able to customize the output to particular set of devices is is just a huge improvement on how we can get this really meaningful information into the right hands of the right people.
How are attributes mapped from the PLC to Losant?
This is a really great question because that mapping is super important. The Device: State node is where the mapping occurs, generally what happens is that the PLC is collecting data already. Through a workflow we can map that data from what the PLC represents what it should be in Losant.
If you’d like to download a PDF of this Q&A, you can here.
