Today we're talking about OT modernization and how plants can approach it in a practical way. Many plant leaders know that they need to modernize, but they feel overwhelmed by the cost, complexity, or the time that's required. So these questions will walk
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us through a crawl, walk, run approach that helps break the journey down into manageable steps that these plant leaders can implement. First, we want to frame the topic about OT modernization.
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So when we say the phrase OT modernization, what does that actually mean in practical terms for a plant today or as you were saying earlier that OT modernization that phrase is very broad? So where have you heard some of those broad terms and how you could maybe better describe OT modernization?
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I think OT modernization is really creating the journey and progression of getting away from what we typically see with factories as old technology always 20 to 30 years behind where traditional IT is. So I think OT modernization is really bringing the plant up into current levels or more modern levels of technology and processes.
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That's awesome. Do you have anything to add, Matthew?
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I might echo all that. A lot of it's right integration. We'll hear the integration between IT and OT, but the modernization is getting visibility into a lot of the OT realms where they used to be completely siloed and again keeping their whatever 10, 40 year old systems.
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Perfect. And before we take another step further, can you guys please give me your name and then your role at Interstates and how long you've been here?
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Sure. I'm at Hansen. Role is senior system analyst of our endpoint security solution. Been here for a little over six years.
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Awesome. I'm Brandon Bohle. I am an operational technology team lead. I've been at Interstates for over 10 years now.
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Perfect. All right. So, a little bit more just talking about framing this topic before we dig into some of the specifics. Are there any other problems that are blanketed under OT modernization that these these plant leaders are trying to solve? Any other issues or problems that they're currently facing that they're trying to work through?
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Yeah. So I think what the big thing with modernization is historically we've seen very old systems that are being used in operational technology and nowadays it can even be hard to find replacement systems. So if we can get systems more modernized when you try to upgrade or improve a process later on down the road or need to replace a system because it's broken. it might not be quite as difficult at that point in time cause you're working with technology that's being utilized and manufactured and created today. Or if you look at some of
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the old PLC's that some organizations are using, uh they're having to go out to the secondhand market to find replacement parts and they're finding these replacements from organizations who have gone through a modernization process and deprecated some of those old systems and they're buying them used and secondhand. And that market's getting smaller and smaller every year. Next,
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we're talking a little bit more about the realities that these plants are facing. Why are so many of these plants struggling to start those modernization efforts? What are some of those biggest barriers that they're seeing? There's budget, time, skills, or knowledge, fear of disrupting production. Do you have any other examples or want to dig into any of those?
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I'll kick this one off so then you can totally rebuttal. I'd say not knowing where to start is easily the first one. A lot of the plant floors have no idea what they really have, where all the equipment is. You start modernization and then you find something 5 years later that's still sitting in a closet that's a complete critical piece to your plant and you don't even know that it's there. Secondary is trying to bring in again that IT conversation and trying to push the same policies to the OT world doesn't always work. You can't use the
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same tools. Those types of things make it difficult or some resistance there.
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I'm going to go back into the budget aspect a little bit. I think budget is a huge aspect of it because it's not just pulling one system out and putting another in. There can be a whole lot of retooling, rebuilding systems, that sort of thing that comes along with this modernization process here. So, I think that can be a huge barrier to entry cause it can be a large capital expense with a long-term to no direct return on investment uh that's visible. So that
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creates difficulties on getting some of these things started. Uh the other thing that I really see with some of this modernization would be the mindset of if it's not broken, don't fix it. Processes are working, so why take the time, money, and effort to update them if they're working in the current state?
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Thank you guys for setting the reality for these plants and what they're facing. Again, we're talking about crawl, walk, run, and we're hoping to build that practical roadmap for this OT modernization. Talking about that crawl stage, if a plant hasn't really started modernizing or making any of those efforts yet, what are those immediate first steps that they should be taking in the first month, 6 months, year?
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The crawl phase, I wouldn't really see a whole lot of changes that need to be made in this stage. I think a crawl phase is more of building a plan, building more goals and objectives at different checkpoints or milestones.
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What do we want to have in one year?
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What do we want to have in 3 years?
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What's our ultimate long-term goal that we're trying to to work towards? Right?
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Having that defined and built out goal is going to help drive everything else along the way. I think a lot of times we'll see people work through projects like this and not have those defined objectives in bullet points where they want to go defined and so they just kind of wander for a while and that takes a lot of time and extra effort and money.
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The other thing is just understanding what you have building out different inventories whether it's asset inventory for hardware software what are the different processes how critical are those processes to your organization right something happens to those what's the impact to the organization from a financial or monetary aspect um how difficult is it going to be to get that process back up and running again I
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talked a little bit earlier about having to move to the secondhand market to find replacement parts, right? What's that going to look like to get that system and process up and running? If it's going to be very difficult and lengthy and time consuming, maybe those are the types of systems that you want to start modernizing first.
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That's a great first step. Anything else, Matt?
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You touched on my main point is the asset inventory that we talked about.
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You can't figure out where you should start modernizing if you don't know what you have yet. And even if you do, then you figure out 5 years down the road you missed a critical piece that was modernized. Deian brought up to today's standards, right? The other one is buy-in. Whether it's from leadership or
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your system owners, you have to go both ways. Otherwise, you're going to get resistance from one or the other, and you're not going to be able to actually engage and figure out your system owners, what they need, how you can upgrade it, that kind of conversation.
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Talking about that buy in and making sure that we're seeing the value in making these changes, are there any quick wins that some of these plants can achieve early on? Anything to where they can stamp that value on and say, "Hey, this is what we can get right off the bat from this."
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I would say easy quick wins are probably coming up with a leadership group, right? Building a committee. These are the people who are going to be responsible. These are the people who are going to make the decisions along the way. as well as again defining what that road map looks like. I think there's going to be a lot of discussions
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that go into it, but that's more of putting time in people's time into it versus really spending capital expenditure dollars on on the project.
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So, in my mind, those are probably going to be the quick wins that really get you started down this path and journey. I think you got it.
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That sounds like a great first step. So we have given that high level of the crawl phase where it's really just understanding what you have and defining and understanding your goals moving into the walk phase. How does a plant know once it's collected all of that, it's ready to move into that walk stage? What are some of those either capabilities or foundations that should be in place first before they step into walking?
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So the the walk phase really I think is where we start putting dollars and and time into improving different processes.
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Um I think a lot of times people are looking more towards the run phase where you're getting a lot more of the analytical data and you're getting real time information. We want to push all of that to the side for now. Right? Start with upgrading systems, getting them into the more modern systems, start working that plan and roadmap, right? We
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want to make sure that the tone is set as this is probably going to be a multi-year journey and we're not going to get the whole thing done in one year.
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Say multi-year might even be putting it lightly, right? It might take you a decade, but it's really finding those that you can't do everything at once.
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You have to start slowly and start with those. Maybe it's the biggest vulnerabilities that you're seeing, the oldest systems, whatever that looks like. Or depending on how your environment wants to approach it, maybe it's the easy quick wins to get some momentum behind you. Right. Let's walk.
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Let's get some good checkpoints that prove that we can do this and then continue to move on from there.
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Well, thank you guys for explaining that walk phase. Now, jumping into the run phase. We've done the crawl where we've understood our goals and we've been able to outline those. We've gotten into walking where we're looking at that long-term implementation and seeing what that timeline looks like. Getting into that run phase. What does this stage look like when an organization has really matured in its modernization
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efforts? What are they able to do now in this phase that they weren't able to do before?
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I'll steal it before you take all my ideas. I'd say starting a fully vetted out life cycle process for one, right?
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um you have standards of when these systems are to get replaced or be reviewed. You start to be able to do a lot more of the analytical things. Now that we're up to current hardware and software, we can get more data off of it. We can improve to a lot of that analytics, find out where we can
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improve efficiencies, those types of things. I think this run stage is where you're going to let the systems dictate where your processes go. You might pull data off of there that let you tweak how efficient your make-pack ship processes are, right? You can say based on the output and analytical data that we're getting from our systems, we can tweak
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different settings and become more productive or potentially create less waste along the way and the manufacturing process is there. Once you can get into those levels of analytics and letting the systems kind of guide you along the way, I think that's really what you're going to get out of this run stage. The other thing I want to talk about with this the run stage is you might still have areas or processes within the plant still in that walked phase while you have other areas that
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can move into the run phase sooner in the process. So you don't have to wait to be fully through the walk phase with everything before you start moving to the run phase. And just because you're in the run phase in one area doesn't mean you can't still be in that walk and learning phase in others.
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So making sure that you're understanding the layers to this progress and making sure that everything is progressing in its own time. Thank you guys for walking me through that crawl walk run phase.
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The whole point of this is making sure that we're providing that practical roadmap and making sure that we have those easy steps for these plants to start implementing. Many plant teams are already stretched thin with their workforce gaps. How can they realistically work this modernization into their day-to-day operations? And
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this might touch on quick wins and some time restructuring or priority focuses.
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Is there anything specific there that they might be able to start implementing in day-to-day operations? So, I think
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this really goes back to building that long-term road map, right? And that road map's going to help you understand where you have the time and budget. It's going to help get that buy in from leadership and then even get that buy in down into maybe line or area specific leadership uh and get those system owners bought into the process. I think that's going to be one of the areas that people working through this type of a project are going to find the most resistance.
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And so getting that buy in early in the process is going to help make these actual implementation steps much easier along the way.
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You nailed it, right? You're not going to drop everything you're doing today to completely move head-on into this.
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You're going to walk and or crawl rather to slowly develop a plan and then you move around priorities, that kind of stuff, right? It's not jumping to do it 0 to 100 in day one.
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All right, we are starting to come to a close to this discussion. We want to highlight some advice for these plant leaders. If there is a plant manager that wants to start modernization this year but only has limited time and limited budget, what is one step that they could take first?
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Start the conversation. Seems easy, right? But that's what we've been saying the whole time is you're not jumping headlong into it. You're not going to start upgrading systems today. You need to start with a plan. So it's more thought processes more than buying new tools and spending money.
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I would definitely just reiterate the whole building out a road map, understanding the criticality of different systems, understanding what are the risks that are are in place with current systems and processes.
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All right, thank you guys for the advice. And I have one closing question to end this video conversation. Looking ahead into the next few years, what will be separating plants that successfully modernize from those that are falling behind or not trying to make these modernization efforts?
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I think we're going to see plants who move through this modernization phase be able to make close to real-time adjustments on their manufacturing processes. They're going to become more efficient in what they make back ship.
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Uh they might even also be able to change over from products or skew in a much shorter amount of time and be able to have less inventory on hand and be able to do more close to real-time or just in time manufacturing.
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Echo. The whole goal is to move faster, right? If you're going to continue where you're at, you're going to continue to be able to do it at that efficiency level. But with modernization, it allows you to be a lot more agile. Like Brandon said, switch your SKS, switch whatever you might need to do, reduce your loss, that kind of stuff that will keep you driving forward ahead of the competition.
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One final question just for myself because I was thinking of it as we were talking. Working at Interstates, are there any clients or projects that you're currently working on where you're seeing a lot of these steps taking place that you're either excited about or that you're looking forward to seeing progress in the future?
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For me, we're working a lot more towards simplification. So, it's kind of interesting, right? We built what we thought would be really well help us be more efficient and move forward. And we found it didn't translate very well to some of the people in charge of the lines, some of the system owners, that type of thing. So, we actually step back and moved a lot towards that simplification so that it's easier to spread across multiple plants, that kind of thing.
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Brandon, do you have any exciting things in the works? Yeah. So, what we're
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looking at doing too is a lot of automation of our normal day-to-day processes and tasks so that it frees up either our time or our plant contacts times to put more effort into these types of modernization projects because if you can eliminate those little fires that need to be done all the time, you can work on some of these bigger and more long-term goals and objectives. Well, thank you guys for sharing your knowledge and your expertise today. I really appreciate it
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and I hope that this practical roadmap can help out some of these plant leaders that are really wanting to take that next step in OT modernization.
