Lloyd’s Register And SAP Partner To Help Safeguard Our Essential Workers

The safety of workers is an ever-present top priority for manufacturers. With COVID-19, there are now extra challenges in safeguarding frontline workers’ health and well-being.

Of course, factory jobs can always be hazardous, with physical dangers from production equipment, chemical dangers in process industries, and health dangers from particulates, biohazards, and the like. Most companies have been making programmatic efforts to improve worker safety for decades, and incident rates have come down steadily for most of the past half-century. Today they’re only a quarter as high as they were in the early 1970s.

Now workplace safety is getting a boost from the tech world: namely, the digital twin software solution being driven by a partnership between Lloyd’s Register and SAP, which builds computer replicas of production systems to help drive health and safety monitoring and improvements.

It’s a marriage of industry powerhouses. Lloyd’s Register, based in London, has been a mainstay in the safety world for literally centuries, having gotten their start in 1760 setting quality standards for shipbuilding and maritime operations, and later expanding into the energy, oil and gas, manufacturing and other sectors. They’re wholly owned by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, and they have annual revenues of nearly $1.2 billion. SAP (NYSE: SAP), meanwhile, is a German-based enterprise software giant that serves nearly half a million customers in over 180 countries. They were founded in 1972 and have annual revenues today of about $28 billion.

A digital twin is a virtual replica of a physical system. The explosion of connectivity fostered by Industry 4.0 technology has made creating digital twins both more economically feasible and more operationally robust. “My point of view is that it’s a digital reflection of the operation,” said Jim Stuart, Chief Strategy Officer at Lloyd’s Register Digital. “We use it to monitor equipment reliability and performance, and prognostically determine when they may fail. Then we can predict what the consequences of the failure might be and how we can mitigate them.”

The Lloyd’s Register cloud-based AllAssets Asset Performance Management (APM) platform integrates with SAP’s S/4HANA software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, and can combine Dynamic Edge with real-time Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to create digital twin replicas. They can predict potential problems and failures, and recommend corrective action to prevent an occurrence before it happens.

“We’re bringing intelligence from the plant floor into the intelligent enterprise,” said Mike Lackey, Global VP of Solution Management, Digital Manufacturing at SAP. “We want to help create an environment where people want to work. We don’t want to just react – we want to become more predictive.”

The ability to do all that relies on field sensors to feed information to the software to analyze and predict. “Infrastructure is the key,” Stuart said. “IIoT sensors gather the data on the plant floor, with systems compiling, monitoring, analyzing and making the data actionable,” Lackey added, “Even on old equipment, we can now add sensors, gather data, and apply machine learning.” The digital twin goes far beyond the real-time floor data from plant systems, using other inputs as well. Those can include individual operator training records and competencies, along with environmental monitors and individual health sensors that can help predict human illness or fatigue. The application of machine learning then allows the system to become better and better at predicting what problems might occur so they can be mitigated. “In terms of safety, we’re rolling out capabilities that allow us to understand how the human operator interacts with the equipment,” said Stuart.

Most prior use of digital twins in manufacturing centered on production uptime and efficiencies, and the technology certainly has much to offer there. The potential for worker well-being may be even greater. It not only adds to the decades-long efforts to improve factory safety, but it also helps with the very current challenges regarding overall workforce availability and the shortage of skilled labor.

“The new generation of workers want data on smart devices, and they want the data to be in front of them,” Lackey said. “That’s where they come from, what they’ve grown up with. Systems will have to become more intelligent. Ours have become much more intuitive – they can be deployed at the point of work.” Greater automation and more intuitive interfaces help reduce the training required for operators. Meanwhile, further increases in worker safety and in the advanced work environments will make recruiting workers easier.

There are challenges to be tackled, though. Data privacy and fear of “Big Brother” environments are examples. “We have body sensors for fatigue monitoring and modeling,” said Stuart. “We can use things like smart watches and sensor equipped hard hats to understand if someone is tired or suffering heat exhaustion, for example. But there’s push-back there – people are concerned about having their data captured. We may need to expand on the scope of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations to help protect individual’s data privacy. Data can also be anonymized, so that it’s not linked to any specific individual.”

Stuart and Lackey see tremendous potential. “We’re really just scratching the surface of safety technology,” Stuart said. “We started the Lloyd’s Register Safety Accelerator to help our clients solve their toughest risk and safety challenges. We are doing this by working in collaboration with cutting-edge technology start-ups from around the world.” Lackey agreed. “Digital twins bring risk mitigation – they help companies manage and reduce risk by modeling their systems and disclosing where the risks are. Protecting their people and their reputation is priority one. There’s new complexity coming that will bring new opportunities – we’re really excited about it.”

“We’re working on the consistency around our framework,” said Stuart. “SAP is helping us drive standardization of things like HR records. We’re improving our mobile and wireless technologies – that will enable us to gather even more, and more meaningful, data. And we have continuous development going on with the quality of our sensor data.”

For Lackey, it’s about delivering on the promises of technology. “It goes back to the basic idea of the intelligent enterprise,” he said. “We’re working to bring sustainability to the forefront of Industry 4.0, just like we’re doing with enterprise business processes.”