Vernon Smit - MES & ERP Systems

"We wanted to showcase how augmented and virtual reality could work, and to have full connectivity between enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing operations management (MoM) systems,”

When Vernon Smit got his first computer, he was ten years old, and it was a birthday gift from his parents. For a kid growing up in rural South Africa in the 1980s, this was a big deal, so naturally, the present came with some parental conditions.

“My Dad said to me, ‘If I find you opening that thing up, I’m going to take it away.’ And he was right to be worried – my uncle had previously given me a toolkit and I got into lots of trouble for opening appliances up to see how they worked,” said Smit. “Electronics was a hobby and as a kid, I loved taking things apart and seeing what I could make by bodging things together, and I guess you could say I’ve never stopped.”

Today Smit is a senior automation and controls system architecture designer engineer at DMI, where he’s settled after a 30 year career working in control and instrumentation. In his time, he’s worked in many manufacturing environments but he spent a formative period working in power generation.

Helping keep power stations up and running has a more direct connection to preparing someone to work at the cutting edge of manufacturing than many might think. The reason is that power stations are often far ahead of the rest of the industry in implementing next generation technology.

“I designed and built power stations, and most people don’t know that these facilities are at the centre of high tech development. They’re extremely advanced and tend to have top notch enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and high end interfacing between different systems,” he said.

“The experience taught me about working across multiple disciplines and in environments with very little margin for error. Power infrastructure is critical to our modern society, but it’s overlooked because of its own success. People only notice when something stops working and that’s very rare.”

Since joining DMI in Limerick, Smit has been involved in a number of projects, most notably the design and set-up of the company’s live production environment. This was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up, because it allowed those involved an opportunity to be creative and lay out a best-practice model of how manufacturing could be done.

"Essentially, it is all about what the customer is producing, the background systems is really the enabler.”

The challenge lay in the remit that this needed to be a comprehensive environment where DMI customers could come to see practical solutions to many kinds of problems. It needed to be a live environment that could accommodate many different use cases.

“In many ways, it was a blank sheet. The brief was to go ahead and be creative and get something really interesting up and working. There were some prerequisites, though. We wanted to showcase how augmented and virtual reality could work, and to have full connectivity between enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing operations management (MoM) systems,” he said.

“We also wanted the environment to be able to distinguish between any machine of any shape, form and size, and then the control system at the back end of that. Essentially, it is all about what the customer is producing, the background systems is really the enabler.”

Making the back end flexible and intuitive was key. In a previous job in manufacturing, Smit had been exposed to the importance of psychology in systems design. Good manufacturing systems are flexible and can deliver a lot of insights, but they crucially have to also be usable and built around the needs of those that will be exposed to them the most.

“There’s an element of human psychology that goes into this too. We need to think about how an operator might sit potentially for a 12 hour shift looking at a screen without getting fatigued? In studies, we can see incidences where highly stressed operators would do things completely contrary to what they would normally do. They’d swear blind they did one thing, but the records would show that they did another,” said Smit.

“And they weren’t lying, it was how they genuinely perceived things in a moment of stress. So, you have to work with that and simplify the user interfaces to make them easier to live with. It’s a fascinating area to work in.”

Smit has spent a lot of time in recent years looking at the concepts of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0, concepts that represent different stages in the evolution of manufacturing, incorporating various levels of technological advancements and shifts in how production processes are managed and executed.

Industry 4, he explains, is the connecting up of manufacturing systems that work fine on their own but become something more powerful when fully networked. Industry 5.0 represents an evolution of this, incorporating emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, and leaning heavily into the concept of human-machine collaboration.

“I’m really passionate about Industry 4.0 and 5.0 and how we’re moving from one to the next. For the last number of years, I've been researching it in depth and I've come to fervently believe that if we're going to make the industry better, if we're going to give people a better place to work and improve the Irish economy, not just now but into the future, this is something we have to embrace,” said Smit.

“In particular, industry 5.0 is about bringing people back into the equation. It’s through marrying the efforts of technology and people together that unique and creative solutions can be discovered.”

Smit suggests that Industry 5.0 and its associated techniques and benefits will continue to drive innovation in manufacturing for some time to come but he also thinks that human systems, interfacing and collaboration are likely to be significant trends in the near to medium term future as well.

“People are increasingly aware of the new capabilities that AI and machine learning offer and we’re only at the start of the uses that people will find for these technologies, things like ChatGPT 4 and generative AI in general. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that coming into the manufacturing space,” he said.

“AI is very powerful but we haven’t yet seen it grow into a standalone force in manufacturing. Right now, some of the biggest companies in the world, such as Google and Microsoft, are investing heavily in AI and over time, that will create a trickle-down effect where the things that are very expensive and difficult to do today won’t be tomorrow. That will impact manufacturing heavily, I think.”