Why buy a toy that no one can play with?
5G home internet services launched in late 2018. 5G smartphones came to the market in 2019. However, deploying factory-wide 5G networks is still a nascent use case, and the required skill sets are rare.
Leo Gargs, principal analyst at ABI Research, says only the big manufacturing and factory automation companies, such as Rockwell Automation, Bosch Rexroth, Siemens and John Deere, have the necessary expertise.The problem for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is the need to make hiring trade-offs.
“There is no candidate who is knowledgeable in all three areas. [OT, networking, cellular technology]”To compromise would require giving up some expertise in the manufacturing OT environment and gaining a little bit of communications knowledge, and manufacturers aren’t ready to make that kind of trade-off,” Gergs says.
Gregory Wilcox, principal applications engineer for open architecture management at Rockwell Automation, said the introduction of 5G will require not only the collaboration, convergence and integration of OT and IT, but also Also This includes information and communication technology (ICT).
Finding employees who can effectively bridge the OT/IT gap is already a big challenge for manufacturers – adding ICT to the mix makes things even more confusing.
Daniel Mai, director of industrial wireless communications at Siemens AG, said those managing 5G networks need to understand all of the uncertainties of manufacturing deployments to absolutely ensure reliability for mission-critical applications.
“Wireless communication in industrial environments requires deep knowledge and experience to deal with environments with lots of metal, reflective surfaces, electromagnetic interference, constantly changing floor layouts, moving participants and industrial network protocols,” says Mai.
Per Treven, senior director of enterprise sales at Ericsson, said not only are these candidates rare, but they’re already being hired.
“Often, the knowledge of the OT environment resides in the OT organization rather than the IT organization. [5G] “You need a bridge between the two organizations, and that’s just as hard as finding people who can actually do the technical stuff,” Treven says.
“Given how much of that knowledge is available in the market; [people] “It’s a very small number. And the people who are there work for specific manufacturers. They’re driving this globally and building that capability in-house. So they’re not available in the market. They’re within those organizations,” Treven adds.
