The company’s manufacturing is a blend of discrete manufacturing and discrete assembly processes with both high volume, low complexity and low volume, high complexity products. The diverse manufacturing processes and complex product portfolio requires many different types of devices, including PLCs, machines, and equipment, to integrate with disparate Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) applications.
The organization needed to establish a data strategy to bridge devices and applications while ensuring cybersecurity and regulatory compliance.
As Dale Tetmeyer, Senior Digital Business Partner at HNI, noted, “We were trying to push data from OT to IT, but without a standardized way to connect our systems, we kept hitting roadblocks.”
HNI's core data challenges included:
- Heterogeneous devices: Legacy and modern manufacturing devices, including PLCs, sensors, and machines, all serving data in proprietary protocols.
- Siloed IT and OT systems: Varying MES, ERP, and SCADA, as well as other OT and IT applications deployed across the globe.
- Cybersecurity risks: Without secure industrial protocols, data movement between IT and OT posed security vulnerabilities.
Solving the data challenge was critical to advancing their digital transformation initiatives. With use cases spanning quality and compliance, reporting, process automation, physical automation, and CAPEX planning, HNI needed a comprehensive data strategy.
"We needed a way to connect everything - our MES, our PLCs, and our cloud-based analytics tools - without constantly reinventing the wheel for each facility,” explained Tetmeyer.
To address these challenges, HNI sought a solution that could bridge IT and OT, standardize data collection, and enhance automation, without requiring costly hardware overhauls.
