Plant & Works Engineering June 2022

14 | Plant & Works Engineering www.pwemag.co.uk June 2022 Maintenance Matters Focus on: Maintenance 4.0 I n all, eight events were held across the three days of the show. They covered many aspects of advanced manufacturing, including robotics, additive manufacturing, cyber security and more. The maintenance event was impressively chaired by Prof John Ahmet Erkoyuncu, Head of the Centre for Digital Engineering and Manufacturing, Cranfield University. His panelists were: Daniel Phillips-Fern, Country Manager, UK & Ireland, IXON UK Keith Gallant, Reliability Engineer, RMS Reliability Matt Grogan, Technical Sales Engineer, SPM Instruments UK Prof Ahmet Erkoyuncu set the scene with an The occasion of the 2022 Drives and Controls exhibition, and its co-located shows (5 to 7 April), marked the first Talking Industry Live sessions. Here, the online panel discussions which were proven successfully online during the lockdown period, and which have now evolved into a regular monthly online event, morphed into a physical event for the first time. Andy Pye reports on the Maintenance session. Talking Industry Live: Maintenance 4.0 and The Future of Asset Management overview of current issues in contemporary maintenance and asset management and how Industry 4.0 plays its part. He emphasised the importance of taking a holistic view on how to accumulate data and how to use it. Digital technologies, he emphasised, should not be considered as targets per se, but we should instead look at how we can apply them to get benefits. Daniel Fern introduced IXON, and how it works with OEMs, machine builders and system integrators, supplying tools for remote service analytics and maintenance. Controversially, Daniel said that one of the things that they hear a lot in industry is that the cloud is not safe, and that machines shouldn’t be connected to the cloud. “It is true that there is a lot of danger out there with hackers and malware. But we believe that the connected machine is the safest option.” Fern continued: “If you think back to 2017/2018, when the NHS was attacked, it happened because the XP based machines and systems were not secure. They were neither up to date nor patched. Similarly, if you buy a machine today in 2022, bear in mind that Windows 10 goes out of out of spec in 2025.” Polling the audience, only one person was on Windows 11. From a machine perspective, the software is going to go out of date quickly. “And if you don’t have a connected machine, who’s updating that software? But what if your