What is OT orchestration in manufacturing?

Operational technology (OT) orchestration is a modern standard for remotely managing industrial operations at large scale over a long life cycle. OT orchestration brings the most important innovations and best practices of enterprise information technology (IT) into OT spaces. With a software-centric approach, manufacturers can create repeatable execution steps to enhance worker experience, which reduces human intervention in operating industrial assets like distributed systems, infrastructure, machines, and components at factories and plants.

Streamlining IT/OT with Red Hat 

Industrial system orchestration simplifies system scaling and management of IT/OT convergence, which bridges the gap between the traditional OT world (often rigid and focused solely on reliability) and the adaptable realm of IT. By embracing OT orchestration, manufacturers can seize the opportunity to enhance their operations playbook, augment engineering discipline with OT service management, and focus on aligning industrial automation services with the needs of their business.

In the face of an increasingly complex environment, an effective and systematic approach to life cycle management is critical. Site owners are frequently confronted with challenges in maintaining, upgrading, and ensuring the compatibility and security of industrial systems, all while managing resource constraints and compliance requirements.

Large installations are not an exception to this demand, requiring routine, minor changes of control application configurations. In the OT environment, control configuration isn't merely a task─ it's an integral part of daily operations.

With the increasing digitization of the industrial environment, multisite operations require the management of remotely deployed software at a large scale and over a long life cycle. In a software-centric, data-driven manufacturing environment, industrial systems must incorporate continuous improvement to stay ahead of the latest updates and evolve incrementally with the industrial ecosystem to increase longevity.

Forward-looking industrial systems require a fully automated upgrade pathway. This necessity spans from top-tier applications down to underlying operating systems, engines, and even virtualized control functions on the shop floor.

Effective OT orchestration results in an intelligent, end-to-end system of interconnected machines, sensors, processes, and infrastructure that can increase growth and innovation and provide immense value for manufacturers and their customers, even in geographically dispersed and distributed system scenarios.

IT/OT convergence provides several benefits for manufacturers. In the modern intelligent manufacturing industry, merging IT and OT systems is an essential step in innovation that brings important competitive advantages.

By integrating their IT and OT systems, manufacturers can:

• Boost productivity by incorporating real-time data analysis, unifying process controls, and streamlining decision making.
• Lower costs by simplifying operations, reducing the risks of manual labor, improving efficiency and consistency, and optimizing factory utilization.
• Reduce production downtime by using data and predictive analytics to mitigate equipment failure, optimize performance, and decrease response time with event-driven automation.
• Improve the product quality and process by increasing visibility and analyzing data holistically.
• Achieve scalability, expanding operations by standardizing processes and unifying data and equipment.
• Focus on security by maintaining better control of devices and data life cycle.
• Increase operational efficiency by streamlining tasks such as PLC updates and hardening.
• Improve collaboration by promoting a culture of interaction between OT and IT teams.

Though achieving IT/OT convergence is important for modern manufacturers, it is not without its challenges. IT and OT teams have historically had different priorities, and fostering collaboration can be difficult. Manufacturers have largely embraced the industrial internet of things (IIoT), but aging infrastructure and poor data visibility are common pain points.

Common challenges of IT/OT convergence include:

• Legacy assets. Many manufacturing organizations still use equipment and processes that are years or even decades old. This can make incorporating IT and OT systems extremely difficult and time-consuming. Aligning digital innovations with legacy systems is imperative.
• Divided data. Manufacturers that have undergone a lot of restructuring may not store their data in a unified repository, which makes sharing it between different systems difficult. In order to maintain growth, information must be properly retained.
• Security concerns. Integrating OT systems with IT opens them to the risk of cyberattacks, ransomware, and other digital security threats.
• Complexity. Not all systems are designed to work together, especially in multivendor ecosystems. Managing the ever-growing complexity of smart, connected products and systems is increasingly difficult.
• Demonstrating value. In order to sustain IT/OT convergence, digital initiatives must produce a clear return on investment.

By orchestrating their OT systems with IT innovations integrated via edge computing, manufacturers can streamline the integration of IT and OT, overcoming many of the challenges associated with outdated legacy systems, limited interoperability, and meeting security standards.

Edge computing—computing that takes place at or near the physical location of either the user or data source—is a top priority for organizations looking to modernize operations and accelerate IT/OT convergence.

By embracing edge computing, manufacturers can implement automation across their factory floor and supply chain processes through advanced robotics and machine-to-machine communication closer to the source, rather than sending data to a server for analysis and response.

Gathering, analyzing, and acting on data on the factory floor in real time can result in profound benefits, including reduced downtime, improved overall product quality, higher yield, less waste, increased throughput, and lower overall costs.

By incorporating IT orchestration strategies into the OT environment, manufacturers can update their systems life cycle at scale, while greatly reducing time-to-value and avoiding costly mistakes due to human error.

Red Hat is equipping organizations with tools to help reduce complexity, costs, and risks associated with engineering, deploying, and managing industrial automation solutions at scale. By providing a proven foundation for open source innovation, Red Hat helps manufacturers manage resource-constrained small-factor devices on factory and plant floors. Red Hat tools and solutions such as Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform and Red Hat Device Edge can help manufacturers orchestrate an end-to-end, seamless OT system, integrated with IT processes and guided by IT principles of agility, efficiency, and security.

Red Hat Device Edge

Red Hat Device Edge can provide numerous benefits on the factory floor by helping manufacturers remotely manage thousands of interconnected robots, machines, and other smart devices. With Red Hat Device Edge, manufacturers can deploy and manage workloads on resource-constrained edge devices, orchestrated with or without Kubernetes, on the same edge-optimized operating system.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Manufacturers can coordinate their use of Red Hat Device Edge and other OT systems across the entire environment using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, an end-to-end automation platform to configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate advanced workflows.

Ansible Automation Platform provides a security-focused foundation for manufacturers to efficiently automate processes across the OT environment, and then orchestrate at scale across different systems, sensors, controllers, and devices.

With Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Device Edge, manufacturers can bring unified development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) principles to the factory floor, ensuring that security is built into the workflow from beginning to end. And with an infrastructure as code (IaC) approach, manufacturers can make their control systems delivery strategy more repeatable, consistent, and efficient, and less prone to error.

The Red Hat partner ecosystem

Red Hat also provides access to an ecosystem of certified partners, including OT automation vendors, systems integrators, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), independent software vendors, and providers of OT orchestration capabilities. Manufacturers can access the partner ecosystem to optimize the implementation and rollout of projects or the management of a fleet, and to accelerate their IT/OT convergence and modernize their operations.

Find out more about Red Hat’s commitment to streamlining IT/OT convergence