To follow up on my recent PROFIblog post, Statistics or Engineering, ARC has published a report that obliquely substantiates my view: Siemens MindSphere: Analytics Paves the Way to Industrie 4.0.
The relevant notion: “New analytics solutions like MindSphere help users with process knowledge, but not necessarily data analysis skills, to quickly set up an analysis.” Like GE’s Predix, Siemens MindSphere is open for the addition of “apps” by third parties that encapsulate vertical expertise.
Previously, according to one key passage:
The analysis of Big Data in industrial applications used to be reserved for data scientists working for big companies with large budgets. The focus was usually on product quality, meaning that data were gathered from samples and inline analysis and, less often, data about the condition of equipment.
This is the area where PROFINET excels.
- Alerting on process conditions (like over temperature) and faults (like wire break)
- Notifying of control hardware problems (like missing or faulty module).
- Proactively treating the control network itself as an asset. (The Network is an Asset)
For the quick summary of these:
The ARC article says that “‘Data Scientist’ is being hailed as the ‘Sexiest’ job of the 21st Century.”
But I say that the future belongs not to the sexy data scientist, but to the engineer who can apply his vertical knowledge in the new platforms like Predix and MindSphere.
–Carl Henning