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Process Control & Automation Technology Keeps Process Operations Healthy

By Mike Charles, Operational Intelligence Product Manager at SolutionsPT

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Mike Charles, Operational Intelligence Product Manager at industrial IT provider, SolutionsPT, looks at how process control and automation technology is key to improving efficiency, productivity, safety, and availability in process manufacturing environments.

By Mike Charles, Operational Intelligence Product Manager at SolutionsPT
By Mike Charles, Operational Intelligence Product Manager at SolutionsPT

Today, more than ever, manufacturing productivity depends upon seamless data communication and intelligent automation systems. The penalties for high operating costs, delivering products late to market, or delivering products with quality issues are severe and can cripple your business. Best-in-Class manufacturers are addressing these issues by implementing process control and automation tools to manage and monitor manufacturing operations and, among other things, improve product quality and inventory flow.

Whilst the UK’s manufacturing industry is said to be leading the country’s recovery from the recent financial downturn, keeping a close eye on operational costs is still a major focus for many businesses, with the emphasis still centred on lean operations.

This can often cause strains on businesses as they push to increase throughput without significantly increasing operational expenditure. It can often be the case that businesses have higher demand than their capacity can meet, resulting in lost sales or delayed orders.

Similarly energy efficiency and waste reduction are top priorities from both a cost and ethical perspective, with businesses now being fined for non-compliance. With both raw materials and energy prices continuing to rise, ensuring that unnecessary usage is eliminated is imperitive.

A further worry for business leaders is being confident they are investing correctly in skills and training to plug the skills shortage left by an ever ageing skilled workforce and a lack of replacements from the younger generation.

With this predicted to continue for years to come, the shortfall in key roles being filled will soon result in businesses not having the manpower to meet demand, resulting in unnecessary but unavoidable down time.

Implementing Process Control & Automation Technology​

In implementing process control and automation technology, businesses can develop a stronger and more insightful understanding of the health of their operations. This can be identified easily through a real-time view of whether manufacturing Key Performance Indicators are being met.

Any changes that need to be made can then be immediately implemented, allowing users to speed up the manufacturing process or increase throughput capacity with ease.

Automation and process control can also allow manufacturing to interact and coordinate better with other elements of the business. Whilst better understanding of throughput capacity can give insight in terms of fulfilment capability, the ability to align the manufacturing process directly to sales and orders means customer’s expectations on delivery can be managed.

Saving data is fine – to analyse it with the right Process Control & Automation Technology is what matters…

Across the UK, process plants, factories and power plants are using process control and automation technology to discover significant opportunities to cut per-unit-production energy costs, reduce emissions and reduce product rejects.

One such business is Syngenta, one of the world’s leading producers of insecticides and herbicides. The processes at Syngenta’s Huddersfield site were capable of producing huge amounts of valuable data, but it was not being stored for analysis, leaving the Syngenta team to react to issues rather than proactively solve them.

Like all other companies with multiple manufacturing locations, Syngenta kept a close eye on production performance across the board and wanted the Huddersfield site to remain one of the leading manufacturing sites.

The company turned to process control and automation technology, in the shape of a high-performance process historian tool, capable of storing huge volumes of data and securely delivering information to desktop or mobile devices.

Ewan McAslan, Site Production Manager at Syngenta, said: “The historian tool, combined with the dashboards we developed ourselves, presents everyone within the business with a single version of the reality.

Prior to its use, we were spending 80% of the time collecting data and only 20% of the time was spent driving improvement. Now, with real-time data at our fingertips, we have been able to rapidly speed up how we improve.”

As with all technology, process control and automation is constantly evolving, responding to new demands of business and implementing the latest developments.

The emergence of a clear need for better analytical capabilities and ways of working with data in order to make smart decisions has become paramount in modern business.

The ability to have a ‘holistic view’ of operations from a single pane of glass, rather than multi-page reports or employee feedback, is now highly sort after in the fast-paced and competitive manufacturing world where the slightest of permutations can result in the largest of variations in output.

This is being driven by advancements in mainstream IT such as the move to HTML5 and ‘slice-and-dice’ data mining tools. However, whilst these tools are commonly seen at boardroom level, they have taken a little longer to permeate down to operations where they can be analysed to provide real insight, which is sometimes referred to as Operational Intelligence.

It is predicted that Operational Intelligence will continue to develop at pace as senior decision makers become aware of what is now possible with the latest tools and how valuable they are to their businesses.

It will become common practice that CEOs and the like will expect to be able to get high level insight into operational Key Performance Indicators in the same way they do for systems such as Customer Relations Management and Enterprise Resource Planning.

The next step for the industry will see data from various niche manufacturing systems such as Manufacturing Execution Systems, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisitions, Maintenance Management Systems and Laboratory Information Management Systems aggregated together.

This can then be manipulated and analysed using accessible browser based, slice-and-dice enabled technologies such as Wonderware Intelligence.

This will become common place and allow those running businesses to directly see the impact of issues on the manufacturing shop floor and how they track back to the bottom line.

The word is out about Process Control & Automation Technology tools…

Speaking with senior decision makers, it is clear to see that this is exactly the kind of tools they need to allow them to drill down and see data which can assist them in making real and beneficial changes in their companies.

As more and more key figures hear about the technology and the benefits it offers, it wouldn’t be surprising to see adoption rapidly Manufacturers need to realise the value that is hidden in their operational data and find out more about the tools available to help them extract and analyse it.

The answers to many questions such as: ‘how can I increase throughput?’, ‘how do I reduce downtime?’ and ‘why is my energy usage higher on line A rather than line B?’ can be found using automation tools and software, and finding the answers to these questions can be the difference between being successful or not.

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    Phil Black - PII Editor

    I'm the Editor here at Process Industry Informer, where I have worked for the past 17 years. Please feel free to join in with the conversation, or register for our weekly E-newsletter and bi-monthly magazine here: https://www.processindustryinformer.com/magazine-registration. I look forward to hearing from you!

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