Key points
While the process manufacturing industry has been on a digital transformation journey for many years, the advent of COVID-19 has added greater urgency to the pace of change. Richard Sturt, Solution Architect Manager at Rockwell Automation examines how the sector is adapting to the ongoing challenges caused by the virus, and how digital technologies will play an important role in the industry’s efficiency and success long after the pandemic has passed.
Automation is certainly not a new concept for the process industry, but the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has placed new challenges on the sector. With social distancing, isolation, and ill-health now part of the landscape for the foreseeable future, many manufacturers are working with reduced workforces and remote workers whilst trying to increase productivity and build new facilities.
They are being forced to rapidly adapt to new working practices that can undermine their existing processes. To minimise the risk of an infection spreading through the workforce they are adopting strategies such as shift separation, isolation, and remote working.
COVID-19 has accelerated the pace of digitalisation and the rush to maximise the benefits of automated operations has led to companies embracing new technologies faster than previously planned.
The good news is that many of the digital technologies that were originally conceived to increase productivity, enhance operational efficiency, and improve profitability are equally as effective at mitigating against the risk of spreading COVID-19.
Distributed control room functionality
When you consider all the challenges associated with social distancing, one obvious problem is the plant’s central control room. Historically these control rooms are centralised to improve communications between plant operators and allow for a better flow of information. However, with the advent of the current pandemic, the strategy is focussed on keeping people at a distance from each other.
Fortunately, there are technologies such as ThinManager which can be adopted to deliver the content where required. It allows unprecedented control and security in a sustainable and scalable platform regardless of the size of the industrial environment or number of facilities.
Its zero client architecture allows for deployment of less expensive hardware while giving users the applications and tools familiar to them in a format that reduces management and maintenance costs while increasing security.
Safety in separating shifts
When it comes to preventing the spread of any possible infection, one of the key areas of concern is the traditional shift changeover meetings. To maintain the safety protocols, distancing and risk reduction are now essential.
Some companies are separating shifts entirely, so they do not meet each other at end of shift, and only essential staff are on site. Instead of getting together for shift handovers every effort is made to ensure shifts are kept apart. The optimum solution to maintain these distance barriers if that effective handovers can be virtual.
To achieve this, it is essential that control systems provide easy to use tools so that important information is not missed or misrepresented. A modern user interface for HMI’s is critical so that the incoming shift can easily recognise the state of operations and any areas of concern.
If there are maintenance overrides on pieces of plant that they should know about. It is more critical than ever that it is easy to troubleshoot and keep the plant running.
The rise of the connected worker
Remote working has been in vogue for many years but as with other transformation strategies it is very much higher up on the agenda in the current situation.
Driven by the growing influence of tools such as augmented reality (AR) it allows experienced engineers located safely at a central location to guide people on site with confidence and without the need to travel.
With products like Vuforia Chalk an experienced engineer can see exactly what someone else is looking at and help them solve the problem without having to move.
With AR, work instructions can be overlayed on phone or tablet cameras or become handsfree using a headset and are delivered in real time where assembly or field service take place.
Knowledge of experienced workers is easily captured and shared with new workers and service technicians. Remote expertise can be delivered to workers no matter where they are in the world.
Another facet of the connected worker or anyone working in a remote environment is to ensure that a secure networking infrastructure is in place to allow visibility of all plant areas from home if required.
Old, less effective networking that has built up over many years is being replaced by modern, high performance networks designed to support the extra traffic with cybersecurity designed in from the start. Networks must be carefully designed so that remote connections are secure and only those who are authorised can access critical systems.
Taking training to the next level
Whether it be instructing new staff or upskilling existing employees training is crucial. With the restrictions imposed by the current pandemic traditional training regimes have been impractical to maintain and while a business can continue for a few weeks without training new staff, the length of time the pandemic has gone on for means that it has become critical to find new ways of working.
This is an area where in the past you would have typically gathered the new staff around an experienced worker to show them how to run the plant. With the risk of spreading COVID-19 that is not a viable solution and to get past this risk, while maintaining workforce efficiency, companies are looking at innovative technologies.
By utilising tools and techniques such as enhanced video capture and expert capture it is possible to record training using AR. This allows the new operator to experience running the plant as if they were standing in the shoes of the experienced operator.
The experience can be documented and enhanced with annotation as required. By utilising AR training both manuals and videos can become tools of the past. AR training has been proven to be more effective and efficient.
Improving plant optimisation
The pandemic has had a dramatic effect of process manufacturing around the globe. Within some segments there has been a sharp decline in requirements while other sectors are experiencing increased demand. This requirement for increased production often means that existing production lines are running at full capacity or even above the original design capability.
To cope with this many companies are looking to new technologies to understand how to reduce waste, avoid breakdowns or increase production.
There is a wide range of products available to help support these activities. Whether it is a flexible reporting tool to help pull together and analyse critical data in person or a more advanced machine learning software tool that can process more data than a human can easily deal with.
One sector that has increasingly come under the spotlight during the current crisis is pharmaceutical manufacturing with the lifecycle for research, development and manufacturing of treatments and vaccines shortened.
Pfizer Global Supply (PGS) produces more than 23 billion doses of medicine every year across its network of 42 global manufacturing sites. They were on a digital transformation journey well before the onset of the pandemic, but that vision has been a large part of their ability to ramp up their efforts.
They set out on a new journey in 2016 when the president of PGS sought to make a great organisation even better. The goal? To support the Pfizer purpose of “breakthroughs that change patients’ lives” by transforming operations into a seamless, data-driven insight engine that drives world-class performance.
While its digital transformation journey continues, PGS has documented major improvements to date in areas like cycle time, manufacturing throughput and yield, and right-first-time quality.
At just one manufacturing site, the digital transformation programme has been credited with enabling the manufacture of three million additional doses of one product above what was planned for in 2019.
New build capabilities
In the early stages of the pandemic many capital expansion plans were put on temporary hold, but business requirements meant engineers had to employ creative ways to get projects back on track in a way that minimised any health concerns.
One area where new technology can help is commissioning new systems. Even with the best planning, commissioning new software usually involves significant time on site with many people working together – with obvious risks of spreading COVID-19.
However, if you build a digital twin and test the software against the digital twin the on-site work can be significantly reduced. Emulate 3D allows you to build a digital twin, with simulated physics, sensors, actuators and even operator displays.
You can then test your control code with the simulator to check that it operates correctly. Some users have found this so effective that they have complete simulations of their plant and test all new plant and modifications in a virtual world before getting anywhere near the plant.
This may not seem like the best time to embark on a major new project but with creativity and new tools great things can be achieved. Some of the new technologies can be used in conjunction with old control systems but to take full advantage it may be easier to adopt a modern process control system like PlantPAx 5.0.
Its new system capabilities help digitally transform operations by introducing process functionality native to the controller, improving the availability of system assets driving compliance in regulated industries, while enabling the adoption of analytics at all levels of the enterprise.
These system features are step changes in helping companies lower the overall costs to design and commission. The functionality improves the overall effort to integrate the process control layer to the enterprise. By reducing the lifecycle cost of the system and lowering operational risks, we are continuing to find innovative ways to bring more value to end users.
A solution for now and the future
As the process sector continues to adapt to the ongoing challenges caused by the virus, these technologies will play an important role in the industry’s efficiency and success long after the pandemic has passed.
When this crisis is behind us it may well be that the current pandemic is viewed as a powerful driving force in adopting new technologies, resolving some of the key problems facing the sector. Highly efficient production facilities could prove invaluable in provisioning food, pharmaceuticals and other products that are currently vitally needed.
