*** An interesting investigation by our colleague - Luis Duran *****

I started working with Programmable Electronic Systems (PES) in safety and critical control applications in 1989, before the IEC standards were released and the term was used, those systems were “special” Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), Safety PLCs. I was impressed with the possibilities of those early systems, particularly the diagnostics available because of at the time (mostly hardware diagnostics built around redundant schemes) however many users were not adopting this technology right away, a cautious user told me that he would retire before using anything other than relays and those that started using digital control systems continued to use standard PLCs; although PLCs lacked those diagnostics, provided similar functionality in terms of logic execution and cost significant less money.

Back to the future, analyst report that about 66% of the Programmable Electronic Systems used in safety applications were installed between 11 and 30 years ago, before ISA 84, IEC 61508 or IEC 61511 were issued and recognized as good engineering practices, that figure doesn’t account for the many relay based systems that missed the initial wave of automation, those where even standard PLCs were not feasible.

According to ISA-TR84.00.04-2005 Part 1 Guidelines for the Implementation of ANSI/ISA-84.00.01-2004 (IEC 61511 Mod)“For existing SIS designed and constructed in accordance with codes, standards, or practices prior to the issuance of this standard (e.g.,ANSI/ISA-84.01-1996), the owner/operator shall determine that the equipment is designed, maintained, inspected, tested, and operating in a safe manner”

A survey conducted from October 2011 to February 2012 indicated that about 47% of respondents conducted a Hazard and Risk Analysis in their sites (only 20% conducted this assessment more than 5 years ago), even though I don’t know their findings it’s safe to assume that some action is required on their PES.

I just started to scratch the surface, but there are three more angles that I’m investigating now,

1. Can you keep a safety system that was not certified and still comply with the standards?
2. Can you keep a safety system that was certified to an old standard even though it might not be certified to the new one?
3. What is the biggest concern delaying a potential upgrade?

I invite the readers to help my investigation or at least to stay tuned to read my findings. 

*** This is the final installment of our series on Industrial Energy Efficiency.  I hope you enjoyed it and the wrap up by our friend Cahal Devlin – a man of few words. ***

 “Energy efficiency programs can impact everything — profitability, reliability, availability and quality,” says Devlin. “Operators must break the habit of viewing the expenditures required to implement energy-efficiency initiatives as a ‘cost center ‘or ‘grudge spend.’ Due to the direct impact that improved energy efficiency has on the bottom line, strategic investments to curb energy consumption will pay for themselves, as well as helping to deliver corporate sustainability objectives.”

 To download the complete white paper, please click on this link.  We look forward to your comments on this fascinating topic.

*** Part 4 of our series on Industrial Energy Efficiency ***

 As an example, solutions like ABB’s cpmPlus Energy Management software can play an important role in helping large-scale facilities to manage their energy-consumption patterns in real time and optimize fuel and power purchasing to reduce energy-related expenditures. The program uses real-time data from process monitoring systems, automation systems and production planning systems, and monitors data and trends from various electricity and fuels providers in the market. For instance, by providing a window into actual energy-use patterns in real time, the system can help operators to pinpoint areas for improvement, improve work scheduling to take advantage of price and supply volatility in various fuel and power markets, and avoid peak tariffs through better load planning, tie line monitoring and load shedding.

The program supports both the engineering and the business side of energy management, by allowing operators to produce accurate energy-demand plans and using them to optimize energy-supply planning and purchasing. Specifically, the software’s planning and scheduling tools can be used to predict energy consumption (based on planned production schedules) and calculate the corresponding energy supply required. Then, using this information, operators can assess different load-scheduling and purchasing options to come up with the most cost-effective energy supply scenarios. Such insight helps operators to lower the overall cost of energy at the facility in two ways: 1) by allowing the facility to take better advantage of the inherent price volatility associated with purchasing electricity and natural gas; and 2) by enabling — where possible — production schedules to be adjusted to take better advantage of this price volatility (for instance, scheduling certain energy-intensive units or production runs to be operated during periods of off-peak energy pricing).

For example, at any given paper mill, different grades of paper typically require different levels of energy consumption. “If the mill can schedule the most energy-intensive production runs to be carried out during the periods when purchased power is the least expensive, the facility will still be getting the same product manufactured, but will be able to save money by reducing energy costs,” says Devlin.

The program also allows operators to simulate “what-if” scenarios to compare alternative operating scenarios and assess how various modifications to system operating parameters and production schedules will impact energy consumption and corresponding purchase costs. Such simulations can also be used to analyze the impact of different purchasing scenarios — for instance, assessing different combinations of electricity and natural gas purchased from different sources at different times — and the information can be used to plan operations in a way that optimizes both operating and budget objectives.

This level of real-time insight supports more well-informed, day-ahead purchasing practices, which can help the facility to plan and optimize its energy purchases to match production schedule in the most cost-effective way. Such software also allows operators of industrial cogeneration to optimize their production of both power and steam. This allows them to either maximize the generation and utilization of electric or thermal power during peak hours (when captive use can help the facility to offset its own power expenditures), or to sell excess electric and thermal power during periods of peak pricing, thereby creating a revenue stream for the site.

Use of the cpmPlus Energy Manager has consistently helped large-scale industrial facilities to reduce their total energy cost by at least 5%.

*** Check back next week for a summary and link to download the full white paper, as always - we look forward to your comments ***

*** The second two prongs of our three-pronged approach ***

 To be successful, any comprehensive initiative to improve energy efficiency must seek improvements in these three areas, each of which is discussed below:

− Technology and control

− Monitoring and targeting

− Behaviors and practices

Monitoring and targeting. Widespread use of the most appropriate instrumentation and monitoring technologies is another essential part of any overall plant-wide energy management program. This includes the use of instrumentation and devices that measure key performance attributes, such as the amount of energy used by the process or by individual machinery components, and any other indirect measure that can be reliability correlated to system performance. For instance, since the amount of oxygen in the flue gas of any boiler or fired equipment is widely recognized as a key indicator of combustion efficiency, the use of oxygen probes is essential to provide the operating data needed to optimize many types of fired systems.

Older brownfield facilities often don’t have the appropriate monitoring or instrumentation in place, so opportunities routinely exist for improvement. “If you get the measurement devices right for the application, you can both identify opportunities for improvement and track the performance and energy efficiency of the unit over time,” says Stubbs.

Behaviors and practices. Just as important as the engineering-, maintenance- and monitoring-related aspects of any energy efficiency initiative, parallel effort must be expended to engage corporate- and site-level managers and all levels of plant personnel — “from the top floor to the shop floor” — and to improve all procedures and practices that can impact energy efficiency. This is accomplished through better planning, workforce motivation, training and certification, improved maintenance practices and procedures and so on. “While the work required to improve cultural behavior and practices and identify areas of resistance is probably the most difficult part of the undertaking, this effort can have the biggest impact on the success of the program,” says Stubbs. “You can upgrade technology, but if you don’t have the right behaviors, practices, procedures, organizational framework and corporate commitment in place, the value of your investment will deteriorate and you won’t see the full suite of benefits,” adds Devlin. “It requires commitment from both corporate and site management.”

For instance, in one recent customer installation, ABB delivered a variable-frequency drive (VFD) to optimize combustion inside a large boiler by better modulating the airflow required. The installation was projected to save the customer 30%/year in boiler cost. “The implementation went well, but twelve months later, we found that the operator on the unit had switched the VFD to manual mode and had gone back to using a damper to control air flow to the boiler because it was more convenient for him,” says Stubbs. “You can put the best technology and automation and control systems in place, but without the proper culture, training and commitment to use and maintain them properly, your chosen solutions won’t be able to realize their full promise.”

Similarly, it is important for operating companies to plan for sustainability. While ABB can provide ongoing support to its industrial customers to ensure long-term, ongoing continuous improvement at the facility, its service offerings emphasize self-governance, so ABB works closely with its customers to establish the right mix of internal processes and procedures to ensure the long-term sustainability of any comprehensive industrial energy efficiency program. “It’s one challenge to work with a customer to implement changes, but it’s another and sometimes subtler challenge to sustain the changes and drive continuous improvement over time,” notes Devlin. “The latter piece is influenced heavily by robust behavioral and monitoring activities.”

*** Check back next week for how to improve analytics and as always, we look forward to your comments ***

*** The first prong of our three-pronged approach ***

To be successful, any comprehensive initiative to improve energy efficiency must seek improvements in these three areas, each of which is discussed below:

− Technology and control

− Monitoring and targeting

− Behaviors and practices

Technology and control. An energy assessment at an energy-intensive process plant or manufacturing facility will identify opportunities for specific equipment modifications or upgrades and improved maintenance practices to reduce energy consumption. Such efforts are typically aimed at such energy-intensive components as process compressors and compressed air systems, pumps, gas turbines, fired equipment such as heaters, furnaces, boilers and steam systems, industrial air separation systems for the onsite production of nitrogen and oxygen, industrial refrigeration and chilling systems, cooling-water systems, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, water and wastewater treatment facilities and more.

The types of energy-saving projects in this arena may range from relatively simple “quick win” activities that require relatively few resources, to more capital-intensive projects that may require procurement of equipment or technology, and additional staffing. Relatively simple opportunities may include improved lubrication practices for rotating equipment, repair of leaky steam traps and elimination of leaks from compressed air systems, and the addition of insulation to high-temperature equipment and piping.

Similarly, advanced process control systems that enable the real-time optimization of process setpoints, operating parameters and control loops can help to improve energy efficiency. Advanced process control can also be used to advantageously alter equipment sequencing (for instance, improving fan system control for ventilation systems). Similarly, variable-speed drives can be added to provide more precise, energy-efficient control of motor-driven equipment, and capacitor banks can be added to improve power-factor correction.

More capital- or engineering-intensive options may include upgrades or replacement of key plant equipment (such as “right sizing” of pumps or compressors), the design and installation of new sub-processes and equipment to improve energy efficiency (such as the addition of economizers for improved heat recovery on steam boilers), or the installation of combined-heat-and-power (CHP) units, which would allow for the onsite generation of electricity and heat for both captive use and for external sale.

Another engineering option for improved energy efficiency is to investigate the feasibility of using pinch technology, whereby the heat exchanger network designs attempt to more closely match hot streams (heat sources) with cold streams (heat sinks) to maximize heat recovery. Operators may also consider replacing back-pressure steam drivers on noncritical rotating equipment with more efficient electric motors, and replacing older, low-efficiency motors with newer high efficiency motors.

*** Check back shortly for the next two prongs *****

*********** Part 1:  Getting started **************

The first step of any customer engagement aimed at improving energy efficiency is to review the current energy strategy and policies that drive overall energy use at the facility, and to conduct a comprehensive energy assessment to analyze the specific energy consumption patterns in the plant. The goal is to understand how and where all forms of energy are used.

“Operators must take this holistic view to understand where energy is being used or lost before they can seek behavior changes to improve the situation,” says Stubbs. “The goal is to develop the data and insight required, and to get the customer buy-in needed, to drive long-term continuous improvement,” adds Cahal Devlin, ABB Energy Efficiency Manager, ABB Consulting.

Efforts to improve overall energy efficiency and realize fuel savings must focus on opportunities related to both electrical energy use (to reduce the power requirements for motor driven equipment such as fans, blowers, pumps, conveyors and so on), and thermal energy use (to reduce fuel required to operate boilers, furnaces, kilns and other fired equipment, steam systems, calciners and so on.)

“Addressing the behaviors and cultural aspects of any energy-efficiency initiative is equal in value to managing the technology, control and monitoring aspects of the project,” says Chris

Stubbs, Global Energy Manager, ABB Consulting (UK). “All of these elements must go hand in hand without altering behaviors and practices, you won’t succeed.”

The goal of such an assessment is to determine current energy consumption patterns, to identify and prioritize specific opportunities for improvement, and to develop the information needed to help the company justify its proposed expenditures and implement selected solutions. “Within any competitive business environment, operating plants need to be able to justify the return on investment of any capital expenditures or consulting fees they incur and defend the net present value of any decisions they undertake,” says Stubbs.

“Energy-efficiency projects must compete with other investments for available capital and since the ‘payback hurdles’ are increasingly challenging, the goal is to come up with an optimized portfolio of energy-efficiency opportunities, and to prioritize those that provide the most promising payback potential,” says Kelly. In general, projects that will provide a payback period of two years or less are given highest priority.

When partnering with a corporate customer, individual process plant or manufacturing facility, ABB provides a team of technical professionals with the appropriate industry specific expertise. Working with the industrial customer,

ABB’s team:

− Conducts an energy assessment to profile existing use patterns

− Identifies and reviews competing opportunities for improving energy efficiency

− Develops a master plan that identifies an optimized portfolio of opportunities

− Benchmarks the competing opportunities against relevant comparative data, such as reliable sector-based metrics, past performance or optimal performance, and identifies relevant constraints

− Identifies the magnitude of potential savings (typically expressed as energy consumption, in either absolute or relative dollars, megawatt-hours or BTUs, per unit of product produced)

− Estimates major cost, capital and time requirements for each proposed option, and the likely payback period

− Assesses the potential impact of each proposed initiative on site operations (such as throughput and production rates, downtime, maintenance requirements and so on)

− Develops a detailed implementation plan

− Works with the customer to support the implementation process for each selected initiative

− Provides follow-up support to ensure long-term sustained improvement in overall energy efficiency

“Individual facilities may choose to pursue specific energy saving initiatives along different lines,” says Kelly. “The assessment process will help to identify all relevant opportunities for energy savings and help to define the best approach for a given facility or company.” For instance, during customer discussions prior to the assessment process, the operator may opt for a full site assessment, an assessment of just a certain equipment class at the facility (for instance, focusing on an aging fleet of motors and drives, pumps, rotating machinery or heat exchangers), or a specific set of unit operations (such as boilers, compressed-air systems or water-treatment systems).

 *** Check back next week for our Three-Pronged approach to Energy Efficiency ***

**** A new white paper series on energy efficiency from ABb consulting services *****

Worldwide, operations throughout the process industries and many discrete manufacturing sectors consume enormous amounts of energy in the form of electricity, fuel oil, natural gas, coal and thermal energy (typically in the form of steam from fuel-fired boilers). These include plants that produce chemicals, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, pulp and paper; oil-and-gas production facilities and petroleum refineries; metals processing (mainly aluminum, iron and steel) and mining operations; facilities that process non-metallic minerals (such as cement, glass and ceramics); water and wastewater treatment plants and water desalination facilities; electric power plants; automotive manufacturing and assembly plants and more.

Operators throughout these diverse industrial sectors are challenged by a complex array of internal and external drivers. These include rising energy prices and persistent price and supply volatility, competitive market pressures, existing and anticipated carbon taxes, the desire to reduce their carbon footprint and output of greenhouse gases, corporate and regulatory mandates related to safety and the environment, and internal goals related to corporate reputation and sustainability reporting. Considering the direct impact that improved energy efficiency can have on a plant’s bottom line, all energy-intensive facilities should investigate site-specific opportunities to reduce energy consumption, and should implement initiatives that provide the biggest opportunity to reduce energy use, minimize operations and maintenance costs, improve overall operations, and increase profitability. Since high energy costs translate to increased operating costs and reduced profitability, the ability to demonstrate continuous improvement in energy efficiency is a critical success factor for the sustained long-term financial growth of industrial operators.

“Whenever energy bills at industrial facilities are large, there will inevitably be opportunities for improvement across the board,” says Chris Stubbs, Global Energy Manager, ABB Consulting. “For many industrial operations, energy consumption represents a major variable cost — but it is also within your control, because opportunities always exist to improve energy efficiency,” adds Jim Kelly, Group Vice President, Head of Energy Efficiency for ABB Group (Zurich, Switzerland). While results will vary from site to site and from industry to industry, with the right set of strategic initiatives, it is possible to reduce energy costs at most industrial facilities by anywhere from 5 to 20%. Given the size and scope of the energy consumed by these complex industrial facilities, even relatively small percentages can easily translate into millions of dollars of annual savings.

*** Another posting from our friend Luis Duran - Global Product Marketing Manager for Safety at ABB ***

I’m sure your house spare key is not under the front door’s mat, or is it? Well I don’t, I never did, I learned as a kid to take different security measures to protect valuable assets. As the technology changed from proprietary to embrace open systems, our industrial automation infrastructure is exposed to the same threats as any other network based computer system and with a range of potential consequences that will fascinate Hollywood script writers but not the average automation practitioner.

I know that my traditional topic is safety and the reason I’ve decided to approach security today is because safety systems have been connected to some type of industrial network for some time and being the last line of defense, the consequence of those system failing due to network related issues ought to be analyzed.

Security is a subject in the recent edition of IEC61508 (Edition 2) Functional Safety Standard, on section 7.4. (Hazard Analysis), requires that in the case the hazard analysis identifies that malevolent or unauthorized action, constituting a security threat, is reasonably foreseeable, then a security threats analysis should be carried out, followed by section 7.5. (Overall Safety Requirements) where it recommends a then a vulnerability analysis should be undertaken in order to specify security requirements

Not long ago the computers running safety systems programming software or the Antivirus software was not considered in the scope of supply of many system vendors; although some users still find that locking a computer in a cabinet is a proper security plan, such plan does not address recommended security measurements such as updating the operating system to cover for recently discovered threats or updating antivirus definition or even backup procedures was not commonly discussed and it was often left to the user to define or adopt their corporate security practices.

Regarding connectivity, using Modbus TCP is relatively easy because the protocol is well known and accessible; however the same reasons made the protocol a potential vulnerability to a system.

Interface requirements and options to make it secure will follow.

 

One of hottest topics in process automation right now is operator effectiveness. But what is the key to accomplishing this elusive goal that nearly every specification for a new system or upgrade is trying to achieve?

Depending on where you look or what you read, you might be lead to believe that the keys seem to fall into a number of possible categories that range from how data is presented on graphics to what color schemes are used for graphics to how alarms are managed; all direct features or functions of the control system. These, and many other direct automation aspects, are important in the overall solution, but an effective operator is one that can make the proper decisions at the proper time and that requires visibility of data from sources that are often outside of the traditional automation system. Without the integration of that outside data into the viewing portal for the operator in a contextual way that is easy for the operator to use and comprehend, the operator will be far less than optimally effective.

When you stop and begin to consider the number of systems and applications that operators must use on a daily basis or are part of the workflows they use in their decision making and problem solving, the list is pretty large. Below is a list of just a portion of those items where integration can make your operators much more effective in safely and economically running your plant.  Consider integration for:

• The safety system to a degree that allows safety actions and events to be recorded within the same history system for unquestionable sequence of event reporting and full visibility of the safety status and its impact on the current operation of the process.
• The electrical system to a level that provides operators with the ability to make intelligent decisions on power utilization options and on load shedding when power losses begin to occur within the plant.
• The plant documentation system for access to known current versions of procedures, plant drawings, Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), and policies to avoid using out-of-date versions stored in printed books that may lead to decisions based on improper information.
• Electronic operator logs and data collection records relating to plant rounds, lockout/tagout, and other typical paper-based data to maintain a complete picture of operational status.
• Video, both process and communications. Integrating process video eliminates the many, often normally ignored monitors that are hard to see and rarely ergonomically positioned so that operators actually get information from them. Communications video is increasingly more important to ensure that messages are clearly understood between central control areas and remote operations centers. The visuals need to be maintained within the operator’s normal workplace so attention is not drawn away from the running process.
• Audio in its many forms such as telecoms, public address, radio, etc. Again, integration into the operator’s workplace avoids risking the operator from being distracted away from the process as is typical of traditional installations where these disparate systems are normally separate and not always positioned well to maintain a process focus.
• Asset management not only for instrumentation, but for other key and major plant assets. Regardless of the asset, direct operator workplace access to the status of any or all assets, increases the understanding of the operational status.
• Maintenance systems like IBM Maximo or SAP PM to help simplify workflows and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR). The ability to analyze issues requiring the attention of maintenance, evaluate the need for and creation of workorders, visibility of spare parts, replacements, assign resources and more to decrease repair times and improve asset availability.
• Business systems, such as SAP, to have visibility of current production requirements to help with their decisions, and provide real time response data to aid others with their decision making requirements.

Operators are the company’s decision making asset connected to the process on a 24/7 basis. Providing them with fingertip access to any and all information they need to make effective decisions directly within their normal operating workplace can result in marked improvements to key performance indicators.

Is operator effectiveness important at your company?  We'd love to hear from you!

 

The fundamental assignment of every plant manager is to ensure the safe and reliable production of expected quantities of on-spec products or materials. Keeping a plant running entails an enormous range of activities and responsibilities.

Considering that process automation is at the very heart of the facility’s operations, it’s evident that plant management must provide this system with the appropriate attention and maintenance. With proper training, some elements of process automation maintenance can be provided by the in-house staff.

However, daily work pressures combined with increasing process automation complexity and rapidly advancing technology make it increasingly unlikely that the in-house maintenance staff can do the entire job. A more effective approach to conducting appropriate preventive maintenance, ensuring repair part availability and keeping system software up to date is to rely on OEM or other third-party service providers.

We hope you enjoyed this white paper.  Please click this link to download the complete white paper.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.

Preventative Maintenance - the next step.

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Process automation is designed to deliver extremely reliable and safe operations. However, a certain level of maintenance is required to make sure this high level of integrity is sustained. Over time, the normal wear and tear of daily use diminishes the reliability and accuracy of even the most robust system and components.

How well do plants address their need to avoid process automation breakdowns?

“Visit 10 different plants, and you will see 10 different approaches to preventive maintenance,” says Crowl. “Some don‘t do any at all. They wait until it breaks and then have to rush to find the resources to make the needed repairs. Others are much more proactive. They go out and check things. They take advantage of the opportunities to replace things when the equipment is not operating scheduled shutdown.”

For some, the concept of “preventive maintenance” means relying on various sensors to assess system hardware health. Maintenance teams may deploy simple, wireless transmitters that measure temperature and vibration, two “vital signs” of mechanical devices. Increasingly, today‘s equipment includes built-in “smart instrumentation” to self-assess health.

“Before arbitrarily placing sensors or instrumentation to monitor system component health, it’s essential to first identify and implement a well-considered preventive maintenance program, based on industry best practices,” Crowl advises. “All the instrumentation in the world is useless unless the process owner first determines the critical components in the process automation and the appropriate operating parameters to measure on each of them.”

That’s why a best-practice approach to preventive maintenance begins with an equipment criticality analysis. Typically conducted with the assistance of the system OEM or a third-party process expert, this analysis assesses the current health of each component and calculates a cost estimate for component failure. This analysis guides the process owner regarding how best to prevent or mitigate risks and develop a fact-based approach to system maintenance.

With that information as a foundation, service engineers can create an easily followed calendar of appropriate maintenance activities. The activities should be based on a careful calculus that considers the component’s criticality, its expected life and position in the predicted lifecycle. This fact-based approach to maintenance ensures that the highest-value maintenance activities are given priority.

While much maintenance is still done by a person crawling around equipment with a flashlight and screwdriver, an increasingly large element of process automation maintenance is accomplished via software modifications. This creates some new issues for system maintainers.

Rather than the accustomed method of assessing equipment or process health via first-hand observation, maintenance personnel increasingly rely on data presented by their process automation. This information should make maintenance easier by providing the alerts needed to call attention to potential process problems. In fact, many maintenance people are overwhelmed by the information provided.

“The majority of system messages are nuisance alarms,” says Crowl. “The maintenance person has a difficult time deciding how to prioritize and address them. They just want to know what to ignore and what to respond to.”

Managing these system alarms and messages can be easily automated. Software is available from many OEMs and service providers that will collect and assess the messages, filter the nuisance alarms and present the high-priority messages to the maintainer. Higher-functioning versions of this software can also analyze trends in alarm rates or type and can predict potential problems before they occur.

Check back next week to see the conclusion and for the link to the complete white paper.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.

Success is all about the training!

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The 30-year veteran maintenance person who knows how everything in the plant works is largely a thing of the past. While there are still many of these long-time maintenance people, today’s workforce tends to be more mobile. The higher maintenance-staff turnover makes it less likely that individuals will simply acquire the required knowledge through years of hands-on experience.

Compounding this issue is the fact that training for maintenance people is one of the areas that’s especially prone to suffer from budget cuts. Most organizations seek constantly to do more with less. As the economy gets tougher and plant owners have to spend more conservatively, it’s often training that’s first to be eliminated. Shortchanging training is an especially short-sighted approach today. Automation systems, like all technology, evolves more rapidly than ever, making today’s maintenance knowledge more quickly obsolete. Ongoing training is vital.

Still, having trained maintenance staff on site can be a tremendous time and money saver. Many process control system issues require only a quick adjustment or simple programming adjustment. Rather than rely on demand services for these types of fixes, it can be faster and more economical to rely on in-house maintenance staff … assuming they have the necessary training. “Unfortunately, training for maintenance people generally lags behind the technology that they have to maintain,” says Williamson. “Organizations that choose to self-maintain their systems must undertake a program of regular training to ensure that their maintainers are provided with the steady diet of skills and knowledge needed to provide quality maintenance services.”

An extremely valuable training resource is the equipment OEM. “It’s very important to take advantage of the training available from the company that provided the equipment,” says Crowl.

“Whether it’s live classroom instruction, online courses or some combination of the two, regular training not only ensures that maintenance departments are prepared to support the equipment, but also that they are doing it properly.”

Check back next week to learn more ongoing preventative maintenance is key to your success.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.

What's up with software?  How does it impact your maintenance strategy?  Read on for more.

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As manufacturing processes are increasingly integrated with computers, a key part of maintenance becomes applying the appropriate software fixes or upgrades, identifying desirable updates and conducting appropriate backups.

“A control system component is just as dependent on software as it is on physical replacement parts,” says Crowl. “Systems need to be put into place to ensure the integrity and availability of the necessary software.”

 

Like physical parts, software may become obsolete or unfit for service, resulting in systems that are unsupportable. This was much more prevalent in the days when process automation was typically proprietary. Still, it remains a serious problem today. In the event of a crash or breakdown, recovering from software-related issues can present a major headache ― a headache that can be avoided by a regular program of software maintenance updates.

The OEM and third-party services available to assist with spare parts management often incorporate similar services related to software management and maintenance. Just as with physical spare parts, these systems can catalog all codes in use, assess both its health and criticality and calculate a scheduled program of updates and replacements.

Check back next week to learn more how training and competency impacts your maintenance strategy.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.

 

Today's white paper excerpt discusses the spare parts aspect of your maintenance program.

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Process automation is comprised of a variety of assets, each with different spare parts requirements. In some cases, it isn’t critical to have spare parts on hand. For example, there may be commodity parts readily available that can be purchased at a moment’s notice. Also, some elements of a system may be off the critical path or can be compensated for via easy workarounds or redundancies.

In most cases, though, a broken part means a line out of production or off-spec product being created. For these components, having the appropriate spare parts on the shelf is critical.

“Organizations require a system to identify and document the spare parts needed,” says Williamson. “Based on the process control system, the operating environment and the needs of the process owner, these parts management systems can detail the parts needed and the criticality of each. They can predict which parts can be expected to continue performing and which are nearing the end their life.

“Not only does this ensure that the plant has the essential parts in stock for quick repairs,” Williamson continues, “It also ensures that no capital is tied up in non-critical parts that continue to sit in a store room somewhere. These systems perform an analysis for each part, weighing the cost to have it on the shelf compared to the cost of downtime caused if the part isn’t available when needed.”

Identifying the parts and assessing their criticality is only the first step in a comprehensive parts strategy. A robust parts system also assesses the health of each part. Starting with a baseline life expectancy that’s calculated from the history of like parts, each part’s current health can be adjusted based on usage, environmental conditions, maintenance and other variables. The accuracy of these calculations can be greatly enhanced through connections to process monitoring systems that measure actual usage. 

 “Parts management applications go beyond just serving as a database of parts and their condition,” says Jim Crowl, Vice President of Parts, Repair, Training and Support Services for ABB Process Automation. “This type of software, available from some OEMs or third-party service providers, also can be a highly accurate predictive tool. They provide the maintenance staff with proactive parts replacement plans that recommend which part to replace and when. This parts maintenance approach, enabled via the appropriate software, allows a logical, proactive approach to equipment upgrades and component replacement.”

There are added benefits of establishing a parts-management relationship with the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) or other service provider.

“Beyond being able to quickly assess their customer’s parts needs, these organizations tend to specialize in a certain type or manufacturer of equipment,” says Haag. “They are often aware of unique solutions or alternate parts, and may have relationships with other organizations using similar equipment that may have a spare part on hand. When faced with the emergency need for a part, these capabilities can often save the day.”

Frugal maintenance people who turn to discount parts providers should reconsider their strategy. Buying parts online or through unknown but inexpensive suppliers often results in higher costs and increased aggravation. There’s no way to evaluate the condition of these parts. They typically come with little or no warranty protection, and there’s no one to stand behind them if – or more commonly when – they fail. The best assurance of reliable parts, backed by a reputable provider, is to rely on the OEM as the parts provider.

Check back next week to learn more about the maintenance of software and computers can also impact your automation maintenance activities.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.

Here's the next installment of our "Four keys to keeping your plan running" white paper.

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In-house maintenance departments tend to be thinly staffed. Maintenance employees often wear many different hats and cover multiple lines or plant areas. Even with well-staffed maintenance departments, plant managers usually can only partially fulfill their maintenance needs.

 Given the constant technology advancements and the need to jump from one urgent maintenance assignment to another, it’s hard for them to consistently adhere to an ongoing system maintenance program. It’s often more effective to rely on outside experts who can provide these services on a demand basis.

 “Demand Service can support the in-house resource where the maintenance person lacks either the capacity or capability to make the needed repairs,” explains Bob Haag, Service Operations Manager. “These hired maintenance people typically bring in-depth knowledge and experience related to the equipment they are charged with maintaining. They may be less economical from a strict dollar per man-hour rate, but their proficiency is exponentially better.”

 Agreements with Demand Services providers include a number of key parameters or specifications. One of the most critical is the promised response time. With the in-house maintenance resource, when the call goes out for help, the job often goes into a queue. The process owner fills out a work ticket and waits in the queue for his or her turn. Demand Service providers are contractually bound to appear within an agreed-upon timeframe.

 “The agreements also include some specified amount of service included, whether that be hours per month or year,” says Vince Williamson, ServicePro Product Manager, ABB Process Automation Services. “In some cases, it may be appropriate to have the service provider place their employee on the customer site full time. Well-designed Demand Services agreements are highly customized to meet the unique needs of each customer. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.”

 Some demand service providers have a call center for their customers. This is tremendously useful because it gives them a single point of contact for their process automation service needs.

 “The call center acts as the demand services ‘concierge,’ who will identify the customer’s need and connect them with right resources,” explained Bill McGovern, Director of Support Services for ABB Process Automation Services. “Many call centers are adapting to the preferences of a younger generation of maintenance people. While you can still pick up the phone, more progressive demand services providers also offer web-based resources, email support and even online chat that lets customers make an inquiry from their smart phone or mobile device.”

Online support for customers can include notifications of relevant maintenance information.  “For example, each month the process owner can opt to receive a list of notifications specifically for the process automation in their plant,” McGovern said. “But it’s up to the plant manager to decide how to process that information. If the plant manager is a self-maintainer, the appropriate people can be alerted to act on the information. If the plant manager relies on a demand services provider, the service engineer can be contacted to implement the repairs or updates.”

 An additional online service is remote monitoring. The plant manager can allow their demand services provider to access process automation data via a secure internet connection. With that data, process engineers can often diagnose problems without being onsite. They can then describe the corrective action or, if necessary, dispatch the appropriate people to make the needed repairs.

Check back next week to learn more about how the right spare parts strategy can impact your business.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.

A blog posting from our friend Luis Duran - ABB Product Marketing Manager for Safety.

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“If you think safety is expensive you should try an accident…”

- Trevor Kletz

There is no doubt. We’re living in times of economic pressure.  Corporations and individuals are looking for ways to increase productivity and reducing cost. However, in the same way that you will not drive your kids to school in a car without brakes to save on maintenance cost, the process industries will not cut cost at the expense of process safety, or will they?

In today’s economic climate, Process Safety is a top priority across many industries including the process industries(chemical, petrochemical, refining, oil & gas production and non-nuclear power) as demonstrated by a faster growth rate in the safety automation market

Companies in the process industries are analysing risk considering multiple dimensions in their decision making:

1. Making the plant site a safe environment for the plant personnel and neighbour communities
2. Complying to the international, national and regional regulations
3. Operating at the lowest cost and highest performance possible

Balancing what appear to be contradicting targets can be a challenge in the process industries but leading companies are committed to reducing accidents and incidents and to improve regulatory compliance.

Alright - you still have questions about the challenges...

What are they doing?

Do they have enough people to do a full hazards analysis?

Is there any new technology that can help in reducing cost and improve efficiency while making the plant a safer environment?

Coming in March to a computer near you, we will discuss (as I was invited to present) the profile and some of the activities that Best-in-Class organizations do to achieve to excel both in financial performance and safety and risk management.

Join Aberdeen Group and ABB for a one-hour webcast on Tuesday March 6^th as we highlight how leading organizations are addressing the need to comply with regulations and reduce safety injuries through a combination of business capabilities and technologies to reach their operational goals.

“If you think safety is expensive you should try an accident…”

- Trevor Kletz

There is no doubt. We’re living in times of economic pressure.  Corporations and individuals are looking for ways to increase productivity and reducing cost. However, in the same way that you will not drive your kids to school in a car without brakes to save on maintenance cost, the process industries will not cut cost at the expense of process safety, or will they?

In today’s economic climate, Process Safety is a top priority across many industries including the process industries(chemical, petrochemical, refining, oil & gas production and non-nuclear power) as demonstrated by a faster growth rate in the safety automation market

Companies in the process industries are analysing risk considering multiple dimensions in their decision making

1. Making the plant site a safe environment for the plant personnel and neighbour communities
2. Complying to the international, national and regional regulations
3. Operating at the lowest cost and highest performance possible

Balancing what appear to be contradicting targets can be a challenge in the process industries but leading companies are committed to reducing accidents and incidents and to improve regulatory compliance

Alright you still have questions about the challenges

What are they doing?

Do they have enough people to do a full hazards analysis?

Is there any new technology that can help in reducing cost and improve efficiency while making the plant a safer environment?

Coming in March to a computer near you, we will discuss (as I was invited to present) the profile and some of the activities that Best-in-Class organizations do to achieve to excel both in financial performance and safety and risk management.

Join Aberdeen Group and ABB for a one-hour webcast on Tuesday March 6^th as we highlight how leading organizations are addressing the need to comply with regulations and reduce safety injuries through a combination of business capabilities and technologies to reach their operational goals.

Don’t miss this chance to participate and ask questions firsthand.  Click here to register.

When I was in college studying for my Chemical Engineering degree, it was pretty clear that engineering decisions were to be made on facts derived from first principals, experimentation, and observation; not on myths and innuendo.  Yet the advancement of automation technologies today within industry applications seems to be more and more limited by beliefs than ever before. One particular technology plagued by this phenomenon is FOUNDATION Fieldbus.

In a attempt to help overcome this hurdle, Larry O’Brien, Global Marketing Manager for the Fieldbus Foundation has provided a fairly comprehensive list of myth busters as part of online article at ControlGlobal.com entitled “Busting Myths about FOUNDATION Fieldbus; Mythperceptions about fieldbus can be changed.”

Larry touches on misconceptions that include:

• Implementation is too difficult
• There is no cost benefit to FOUNDATION Fieldbus
• I don’t’ need to invest in FOUNDATION Fieldbus when there is wireless technology
• There are not enough system integrators with good project implementation experience
• Control in the field poses risks and compromises system availability.
• And many more …

I will be the first to admit that FOUNDATION Fieldbus (FF) is not appropriate for every control application, but it does have the ability to create value within many of your automation solutions ranging from benefits of control in the field to being able to deliver alarms directly from devices rather than separately configured and managed through a controller CPU. And like most fieldbuses today, FF is widely extendable through your facility when implemented with the High Speed Ethernet (HSE) architecture option.

If you or your organization has struggled with realizing the benefits of FOUNDATION Fieldbus, take a read of Larry’s myth buster article and get past the misconceptions and start to benefit from a key automation technology.

Today we're going to start another five part series based on a White Paper entitled "Four keys to keeping your plant runnin".  This topic is of great interest to plant managers in all industries.  I hope you find this interesting.

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Plant managers, faced with ever-smaller budgets and ever-increasing competitive pressures, may fail to put a thorough maintenance plan or process in place. What they may not realize is that, for process automation as well as production equipment, a well-planned and executed maintenance program will produce a measurable return by ensuring maximum uptime, reducing overall costs and, most importantly, contribute to the safety of the people, plant and processes.

 Especially today, as manufacturing processes are increasingly integrated with, and managed by, process automation, a key part of maintenance is directed towards automation systems. What is required is a consistent focus on activities designed to keep their plant running reliably through appropriate attention to their process automation.
Specifically, this entails focus on four key areas of activity:

• Identify appropriate demand services
• Ensure parts availability
• Provide necessary training
• Conduct ongoing preventive maintenance

Check back next week for more in this series on keeping your plant running through a dedicated focus on automation system maintenance.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.

 

A report published by Aberdeen Research in November 2011 indicates
that despite the difference in motivations, Best-in-Class companies must
establish a formalized risk management strategy and ingrain safety as part of the culture through executive leadership. The same report also indicates that manufactures are challenged with the ability to have the right skills sets and knowledge base for managing their safety system - and the effect is magnified by the impending retirement of a large number of experienced workers over the next few years.

Competence and the skills sets of resources involved in the safety of the facility has been a long standing requirement of the international safety standards. Recent changes, however, have now made these requirements mandatory.

Although training is not the only solution, it is a choice that manufactures can use to support their financial and safety goals.  If you are seeking to expand your current knowledge on Process Hazard Analysis and Safety Reviews, check out this class on PHA and PSSR.

Process Hazard Analysis (PHAs) (including HAZID and HAZOP) and Pre Start-up Safety Reviews (PSSR) are essential elements in managing the process safety impact of new projects, and the ongoing operation of existing plants. The techniques covered in this course are directly applicable to all industry sectors including oil & gas, petrochemicals, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals and utilities. They are well proven and highly- effective for identifying hazards, assessing risks and developing improvement plans.

Typical attendees are process design engineers, safety managers, HSE managers, PSM Managers, advisors, engineers or business technical personnel who are likely to lead PHAs and PSSRs on a regular basis.

I know this is short notice, but the course is going to be in the Galleria area of Houston (Hotel Derek, 2525 West Loop South, Houston, Texas 77027) starting Monday February 20th - Friday February 24th 2012. 

For more information visit http://tinyurl.com/PHA-Leaders

Here is the conclusion of the “Reliability: A disciplined approach improves asset availability, plant performance and profitability” white paper.  The link to download can be found at the bottom of this post.

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When it comes to reliability, strategic investments yield demonstrable payback. For instance, at a copper smelter in Finland, ABB was able to improve equipment availability and thereby raise OEE by four percentage points, enabling the facility to create hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue each year. Concurrent with these improvements, total maintenance costs were reduced by 12%.

 Similarly, during a recent pulp-and-paper mill engagement, ABB was able to boost equipment availability from 71% to 87% — while reducing total annual maintenance costs at the facility by 20% over the same period.

 “While it won’t necessarily be easy, and results will vary from plant to plant, maintenance improvement initiatives often have a direct, demonstrable impact on earning power, especially when the efforts are able to improve OEE at the facility,” says Baptista, adding: “For instance, at one steel mill customer, it was shown that the ability to increase OEE by 10% would have the same impact on the company profitability as a 95% reduction in the total maintenance costs, or a 6.3% increase in sales prices.”

 Meanwhile, payback periods of six months or less are common for many strategic maintenance-related activities, adds Ginder.

“Equipment will fail whenever it wants to, at any time of the day or night, and as many operators know, when that happens, it will be a mad dash to get it up and running again,” says Rosales. And in some cases, the unforeseen failure of critical equipment components or systems could have catastrophic consequences, in terms of safety, environmental issues, collateral damage or business interruptions. “The goal is to be as strategic and well-informed as possible, to minimize dependence on reactive maintenance, since that tends to be the least efficient and most costly approach,” he adds.

 “Literally every piece of equipment you buy needs to be operated and maintained properly or it will fail. Yet when it comes to reliability, too often, people point to the maintenance personnel and say ‘It’s their job,’” says Rosales. “Reliability shares a lot of parallels with plant safety. At the end of the day, it’s everybody’s job.”

To download the complete white paper, please click on this link.  I hope you enjoyed this white paper and we look forward to your comments.

World-class process plants and manufacturing facilities follow these management principles when organizing and carrying out reliability-related initiatives.

Adopt common terminology and definitions. To be successful, any facility-wide program must work to establish common language and consistent definitions for all operators to use when describing, classifying and prioritizing different equipment issues and failure modes. “Every maintenance technician describes equipment failures in different ways,” says José Baptista, Global Reliability Technology Manager for ABB Full Service. “It’s important to create systematic failure codes and insist that all plant personnel use them consistently.”

“This will also help plant operators to prioritize which failures must get attention first,” adds Rosales. “Without this, if you ask ten different people ‘What types of failures constitutes an emergency for you?’ you’ll get ten different answers.”

Implement standardized practices and procedures. “Even the reliability performance of the best-designed plants will deteriorate as procedures, practices and personnel change over time,” says Ginder. The ability to implement standardized procedures serves two general purposes — it ensures consistent operation and maintenance of critical equipment from day to day and from shift to shift, and it helps to minimize the loss of institutional knowledge and expertise that often results from personnel turnover. The use of standardized practices is also key to helping the facility to become self sufficient in terms of maintaining improved reliability over time.

Move from reactive to proactive maintenance techniques. Good maintenance and reliability is what differentiates ordinary industrial facilities from world-class facilities. “At the end of the day, if you are not confident that you can start up, operate and shut down your operations, you won’t be able to meet your customer’s demands,” says Ginder, adding: “If you don’t properly address the reliability issues at your facility, you will always be plagued by higher costs and unexpected delays and downtime.”

“Depending on the nature of each equipment component or system — and its criticality to the overall facility operation — the facility must develop a comprehensive plan and decide which maintenance strategy to apply to each component,” says Baptista. Different strategies include preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance, condition-based monitoring and maintenance, fixed-term replacement and refurbishment, and operate to failure.

In general, the use of proactive maintenance techniques allows operators to identify when equipment performance is starting to decline so they can intervene early. The criticality analysis discussed earlier will help operators to plan the most logical approach for each component or system.

Get the most of your maintenance management systems. Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Systems are widely used by operators of complex process industries operations and discrete manufacturing facilities to track and document equipment maintenance and reliability activities. Operators can then use this information to improve equipment performance. When used to their fullest capabilities, CMMS and EAM tools can help plant personnel to make best use of the operating, monitoring and failure data (for instance, enabling condition-based monitoring to support preventive maintenance), and to track and document successful practices so that they can be disseminated more broadly throughout the facility or implemented at other locations.

Reliability is not just about how equipment is maintained, it is also about how equipment is operated – so involvement in the process and understanding of the outcomes by process operators is essential in achieving world class reliability.

Strive for continuous improvement. In all capital-intensive process and discrete manufacturing plants, equipment performance will deteriorate over time. “It’s not that operators necessarily start out with poor processes or practices, but over time, with ups and downs in prevailing market conditions creating budget pressures, or changes in management philosophy or personnel turnover, equipment performance can deteriorate,” says Rosales. This underscores the importance of both a rigorous, systematic approach to reliability management, periodic review and ongoing training and certification to ensure continuous improvement. One useful rule of thumb is to allocate 4% of labor hours to continuing education, using a mix of classroom training and in-house coaching.

“Facilities must strive for continuous improvement,” says Baptista. “If you are still having failures, you must revise your maintenance strategies some more.”

Check back next week to learn if reliability programs are money well spent.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.

To achieve world-class reliability, it’s not enough to focus on reliability improvements alone. Benchmarking helps operators to identify numerous areas in which they should focus their reliability-improvement initiatives. The best way for process operators to justify their time and effort up front, and to assess the benefit of their investments over time, is be able to assess the ultimate financial impact the initiatives are able to deliver.

While Availability (expressed as a percentage of time the process is running divided by planned production time) is a useful and widely used metric to characterize plant performance, it does not provide a complete picture of overall plant reliability. In recent years, the overarching concept of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) has emerged as a key performance indicator for monitoring and managing the reliability of critical plant assets and systems, and provides a more direct indication of how improved reliability practices saves money for the operator.

Specifically, OEE reflects how machinery, production lines and processes are performing in terms of availability, performance and quality. As it pertains to reliability-improvement initiatives, “OEE is one of the best measures of performance, because it takes into account not only whether the equipment is available and running when it should be, but whether the facility is making quality product when it should be,” says Baptista.

 

Equipment effectiveness can be maximized through efforts to control or eliminate reliability or productivity issues that arise from the “six major losses” that can be categorized in the following groups and subgroups:

 -  Unplanned downtime losses (Availability Factor, A)

     Equipment failures (breakdown losses)

     Set-up and adjustment losses

 -  Speed losses (used to calculate the Performance Factor, P)

     Idling and minor stoppages

     Operation at reduced speed

 -  Quality losses (used to calculate the Quality Factor, Q)

     Defects in process operations and reworking

     Startup losses

 The OEE value is obtained using the following equation:

     OEE = Availability Factor x Performance Factor x Quality Factor or OEE = A * P * Q

During plant operation, each of the three factors A, P and Q is calculated over time as a percentage. Thus, for a given installation, if the value of each were 90%, OEE would be calculated as 90% x 90% x 90% = 0.73%. Depending on the specific industry sector, OEE values >80% are considered to represent world-class operation, while OEE <60 denotes a need for serious improvement.

As noted earlier, for the best sustained results, the ability to make strategic changes to the overall approach to reliability requires standardized protocols and practices related to work-flow management, planning, scheduling and execution of maintenance activities. “If you can carry out all maintenance-related activities using repeatable processes — for instance, standardizing processes related to creating work orders, prioritizing tasks, scoping the job, executing the job, and analyzing the results — you’ll get improved results,” says Ginder. This will eliminate redundant steps, which will drive efficiency, reduce excessive expenditures and improve reliability-related outcomes.

If possible, operators of multiple facilities should also implement their improved reliability procedures across all of their sites. The dissemination of standardized practices across multiple facilities will drive reliability for the company, and will enable comparative analysis to be conducted to support continuous improvement.

Check back next week to learn what makes a great reliability program.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.

In any process plant or discrete manufacturing facility, the ability to improve equipment reliability depends on how well operators are able to identify problem areas with critical assets. This along with performing root cause analysis to understand the underlying issues, rectify recurring losses, and applying proven solutions as broadly as possible across the entire plant will help sustain the improvements over time.

 Many industrial facilities are inherently equipment-intensive operations. As a result, maintenance-related costs represent an enormous portion of their overall operating expense. Unplanned downtime of critical components at any of these facilities can have a significant impact on operations, production capacity and profitability, and can increase the risk of safety and environmental issues, as well.

Strategic efforts to improve plant reliability and reduce equipment failures help to support plant and business objectives in a number of ways. Such initiatives can help to maximize plant run times, throughput rates and product yield while minimizing downtime, emergency work handled, spare parts inventories, and maintenance costs. Such improvements, along with the ability to extend the life of critical assets, improve plant and personnel safety, ensure environmental and regulatory compliance will provide demonstrable profitability improvement of the facility and company.

“One common mistake that many industrial facilities make is for plant personnel to jump in and get started carrying out equipment-specific initiatives in a vacuum,” notes Rosales. “You need an overarching blueprint to make your reliability improvement efforts as cost-effective and successful as possible.”

While maintenance activities are conducted at the equipment level, the ability to influence and improve plantwide reliability requires that appropriate effort be expended to improve the businesses processes that ultimately guide all maintenance related procedures and practices. “The goal is to set up the right organizational structure and work-management procedures needed to maximize equipment availability while minimizing the maintenance spend,” says Andy Ginder, Vice President, ABB Consulting.

However, adopting a comprehensive top-down approach to improve reliability can be challenging. “When plant operators install more equipment monitoring systems to improve

reliability, everyone can see and feel those solutions,” says Ginder. “The idea of improving the underlying businesses processes and procedures is much harder to envision — yet it’s not less important.”

What separates world-class facilities from others is their willingness to invest the time and efforts required to be as strategic as possible when it comes to plant maintenance and reliability.

At the end of the day, the ability to achieve Total Plant Reliability ® (TPR) requires reliable practices, reliable people and reliable assets. ABB’s offerings in the reliability arena range from comprehensive consulting services to full turnkey operation of the client’s maintenance department. In both cases, ABB works closely with its industrial customers to improve reliability throughout the entire facility, and sustain this improved performance over time.

“Industrial operators must recognize that optimized maintenance and reliability is the foundation on which most other operating and business objectives are built,” says Andy Ginder, Vice President, ABB Consulting.

Check back next week for more in this series on reliability.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.

The automation world seems to be constantly trying to answer the question, “Which solution should I choose. PLC or DCS?” Now there is some new help at arriving at the right choice, or at least getting in the ballpark. The Better Way is a new decision tool to aid in making the choice.

The site asks the user to answer 14 basic questions about the application along with some contact information and then within minutes, emails a report with the “best” and “next best” recommendations between PLC, Process PLC, Small DCS, or Large DCS. Some background information is provided as to why the particular recommendations have been made along with supporting information about the selection criteria used.

Please give it a try and then provide feedback here on how well you think it worked for your situation.  If the link above does not work, copy and paste the following url into your browser: http://www.processautomationinfo.com/25

A Field Device Integration (FDI) host system prototype and the use of FDI device packages for Foundation Fieldbus, HART, and PROFIBUS device integration was presented at the NAMUR Annual General Meeting 2011 in Germany, based on a multi-vendor system.

 

For the first time ever, FDI device packages are being used to integrate Foundation Fieldbus, HART, and PROFIBUS field devices of various manufacturers within an ABB process control system including typical applications such as parameter assignment, configuration, diagnostics, and maintenance. The system makes use of prototypes of FDI standard host components developed by the FDI Cooperation.  The purpose of the working prototype is to verify the FDI concepts, apply the standard host components in a system context and demonstrate FDI functionality.

FDI provides users and manufacturers of field devices with a uniform and easy-to-use solution for device integration into systems, asset management and device configuration. End users and device manufacturers benefit from the following advantages: The life cycle costs will be effectively reduced in the long run, the handling becomes easier and the technical risks will be minimized.

General information on FDI Corporation:

FDT Group, Fieldbus Foundation, HART Communication Foundation, Profibus & Profinet International, and OPC Foundation launched a company to manage ongoing development work on FDI, the common solution for device integration. The new organization has three main tasks:

• Completing the standardization of FDI under IEC (International Electrical Commission)

• Managing and maintenance of the FDI & EDDL specification

• Allocation and maintenance of Standard Host components and of the FDI Tool Kits for system and device manufacturers.

The company (FDI Cooperation, LLC) will be managed by representatives of the five foundations and seven of the leading automation suppliers. Hans-Georg Kumpfmüller from Siemens will serve as Chairman of the Board and Achim Laubenstein from ABB has been nominated as Executive Director

What do you think about FDI?  The next great thing?  Or just another fieldbus group?

There was a request made in a comment to an earlier posting on this blog for a good book on DCS. I have also seen other such requests made in LinkedIn recently from people looking for a good resource on the topic.

Since the demands on and functionality of the DCS have evolved to far more than basic control in the last decade, let me recommend an ISA publication from 2010: Collaborative Process Automation Systems by Martin Hollender and other contributors. Martin is a colleague at ABB and undertook this book as a project to provide a text book on the modern DCS that fits into the title that stems from the ARC Advisory Group CPAS vision (link 1) (link 2).

Quoting from the back cover of the publication …

“Providing a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in Collaborative Process Automation Systems (CPAS), this book discusses topics such as engineering, security, enterprise connectivity, advanced process control, plant asset management, and operator efficiency. Collaborating with other industry experts, the author covers the system architecture and infrastructure required for a CPAS, as well as important standards like OPC and the ISA-95 series. This in-depth reference focuses on the differences between a CPAS and traditional automation systems. Implications on modern automation systems are outlined in theory and practice. This book is ideal for industrial engineers, as well as graduate students in control and automation.”

Check it out. It may not be a page-turner like a great mystery, but it is a real good source of information. The book is available at ISA.org.

Cyber security is one of the hottest topics we have in our industry right now. If you are looking for good information on the topic, go to Sustainableplant.com and get the latest information for Cyber Security 101 for Industrial Control Systems.

The topic was recently presented as a live webcast, and is now available on demand. The presentation from John Fridye, Product Manager for Cyber Security at Ventyx Inc covers the basics of cyber security for control systems including key issues biggest challenges, biggest security risks, pragmatic steps to increase your security posture and more.

Link to the registration page here.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

An article that appeared in ControlGlobal.com on 11/10 touched on the subject that operators need to learn and be trained differently in the process industries. A scary statistic was provided indicating a study from the fossil power industry shows “that it takes up to eight years to fully equip operators with all the training and experience they need for context and appropriate situational awareness.”  Additionally, the article states “that even after eight years experience, most operators are only up to about 30% to 35% of the situational awareness and knowledge that they should have.”

In today’s manufacturing environment, if that eight year time frame is really representative, then our manufacturing facilities are facing the possibility that they never really do get fully experienced operators going forward in time due to high frequency turnover cycles!

Is it possible that one reason for this situation is that we still expect operators to run a process pretty much the same way they did when automation first came to the process industries? Back then there were single loop pneumatic controllers distributed around the plant. Now we use sophisticated DCS with large, high resolution displays, but in most instances, we still expect an operator (one normally, instead of several back in the single loop days)  to know how to properly interact with 100’s or even 1000’s of individual devices to safely and profitably operate a plant.

Today we have automobiles that can park themselves, have the intelligence to slow down by themselves when getting too close to other cars in traffic, have rear view mirrors that automatically dim when light conditions change, and have voice activated systems for all kinds of functions to create a safer driving environment so the car operator doesn’t have to do things themselves.  Yet we expect that same car operator to operate a multimillion dollar process controlling nearly everything individually! 

Why not automate more and require less of the operator for the actual “control” of the process? The DCS with the large screen displays is capable of doing far more than most companies are requiring of it today. It is capable of managing large sequential operations that can be populated with much of the great operational knowledge that the really experienced operators out there today have.  And that knowledge is then captured for all future operators to use. Designing processes with this kind of procedural control can reduce the number of interface items an operator needs to learn about by very large factors. Extending control to full units can reduce the necessary faceplates from 100’s to 1 or just a few. How much might that impact the ability to train an operator and create experience? Plus the methodology also delivers on increased safety and improved return on assets.

This is the very subject under consideration by the many people in our industries involved with ISA106, Procedural Control for Continuous Process Operations. Changing the overall operational control to a State Based Control design may be a key answer to improving operator performance and aiding in how effective training them can be.

What do you think?

Here is the conclusion of the “Three Steps to Improving your Production Process” white paper.  The link to download can be found at the bottom of this post.

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Healthcare experts are unanimous in their advice that individuals should have regular examinations to achieve optimum health and longevity, rather than waiting for a problem that requires inconvenient and expensive emergency care.

That scenario plays out precisely the same with manufacturing processes. Outside optimization services are often called in only to solve acute problems like poor quality or low productivity. Tran says they are equally valuable in addressing chronic, but often unseen, hindrances to an optimized process. In almost every process, regardless of how stable or reliable it is, there are opportunities to advance its performance. OEMs and third-party engineering firms can apply the tools and insights needed to bring about major, sustainable process improvements that deliver an impressive return on investment.

“Inviting optimization experts to investigate a process typically results in some combination of enhanced quality, reduced costs and shortened production time, all of which may provide a business advantage, “Tran says. “Most plant managers are surprised when they discover the improvement – and fast return on investment – from optimizing a process that has no apparent problems.

To download the complete white paper, please click on this link.  I hope you enjoyed this white paper and we look forward to your comments.

A posting from our colleague Roy Tanner

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A long, long time ago… in a plant far, far away…

As a young project engineer about two decades ago, I was working for a company making - let’s say widgets.  I won’t get into the real product as that would cause me to ramble on for days.  The front end was a process to make a powder type substance that involved mixing, extrusion, drying, etc which then went into an assembly that was manufactured on production lines. 

At this plant site, there was a huge debate on whether to use a PLC or a DCS on various parts of the overall production and though there sometimes was no right or wrong answer, I think we did a pretty good job using both automation platforms in the right places based on our criteria at the time.  The criteria items we used were based on more than the platforms and what they were known to be “good” at performing.  We also considered the personnel, i.e. maintenance technicians, engineers, etc…, and their skill sets as well as technical and interface requirements. 

The categories….

Twenty years later, PLC vendors still claim that they can do distributed process control and DCS vendors have answers for the PLC, or they have PLC products themselves.  So, with a superficial glance not much has changed.  However, if you look a little deeper, there are some new categories that are worth considering as some product types meet various requirements slightly better than others.  Please note that I said “slightly” as most all automation solutions have a PID block, can do ladder, have I/O…hence they can all turn on a pump or read a temperature.  It’s more about what is a better fit.

An analogy would be similar to that of automobiles.  Many years ago, the most popular vehicles were sedans and trucks.  Today, there are definitely more options for a car buyer to choose from based on their preference and how they will use the vehicle.  There are coupes, hybrids, 3 and 5 door hatchbacks, SUVs, 4-door trucks, and of course the mini-van just to name a few.  Similarly, there are multiple automation solutions that are between a PLC and a DCS.  In this exercise, we have limited our efforts to dealing with “process control” and therefore, there are some categories that I’m sure we left out such as PAC (Programmable Automation Controllers) and others that didn’t come up in conversation.  So, the solution catagories ended up as follows:

• PLC Solution – Programmable Logic Controller that may be coupled with a HMI/SCADA or panel for user interaction. 
• Process PLC Solution – A Controller that has more analog control functionality while retaining a ladder logic, component based approach to meet smaller OEM and project requirements.  This solution would include an HMI/SCADA and/or panel for user interaction.
• Small DCS Solution – A distributed control system that has the HMI, fieldbus, and control engineering tools pre-packaged, but is more manageable than a large traditional DCS.   These systems usually have a smaller footprint than traditional DCS systems and with the built in diagnostics and a single tag database a lower cost of ownership can be realized.
• Large DCS Solution – A distributed control system with extended features to meet today’s demanding production requirements such as integrations with various plant (electrical, safety, facilities…) and business systems, multi-fieldbus integration capabilities and built in applications for asset optimization, batch management, and long term history.

The Criteria …

In other words, what information is the minimum that would be needed to favor one solution over another?   If it didn’t have an impact the decision, then we shouldn’t worry about getting the answer.  After much discussion, the criteria topics that remained were as follows:

• Inputs and Outputs -  I/O count is a good measure of how big the project will be as well as giving an indication of the level of analog control that’s required.  Example: Yes a PLC can do analog control and a DCS can do discrete applications, but one solution definitely has the edge over another when it comes to PID functionality, options, and analog control handling.
• Type of process – Knowing the type and speed of the process can help you select the right solution.  Is the application continuous or batch?  Does it require scans below 100msec?  Is it a batch process with ISA S88 type requirements such as equipment arbitration and production reporting or a single line, step-wise process where sequential function charts can be used easily.  Example:  Yes, you can always put a batch application on top of a PLC, but pre-packaged solutions are easier to configure, maintain and expand.   Example: Yes a DCS can do applications under 100 msec, but this usually limits what else can be done with the processor.
• Control requirements – Will the process controllers in the project need to be communicating with each other to provide a coordinated solution or are they standalone with little or no cross communications?  Is redundancy required?  Example:  Yes, a PLC can be redundant or in a stand-by configuration, but other solutions have built in, monitored redundancy on the controller, fieldbus, and I/O levels. 
• User Interface requirements – How many Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) or operator workplaces are needed?  Is there a central control room or many satellite control rooms, or is a panel/standalone HMI solution required?  The level of alarm management required can also help point to a solution.  If you are trying to reach EEMUA 191 guidelines or ISA 18.2 compliance, then a solution that has certain features and architectures has an advantage over others. 
• Staffing and project execution – The knowledge level and organization that is available should be part of the decision making process.  You don’t want to give a Maserati to a teenager that just got their license.  Who is going to execute the project and maintain it over time has a big impact on what solution should be chosen.

 The revelation…

Now working for an automation supplier, I was in yet another meeting trying to position our various automation offerings in order to help our channel partners and project organizations know which product they should use in various situations.  Fortunately, we have multiple competent automation offerings which, of course, overlap slightly with each other.  We realized that there is no right or wrong answer.  Technical fit, market trends and project personnel experience all impact the solution choice. The discussion we were having reminded me of ones I had at the plant where I worked at the beginning of my career.  Therefore, we decided to get some experienced project engineers to give their opinion to see if we could come up with a criteria and scoring system that would recommend an appropriate solution.  The result is called the ABB Process Automation Decision Tool.  

The solution…

In order to use this tool, you will need to know your project basics as there are 14 questions gathering the information listed as criteria above.  The result is a report that will immediately be e-mailed to you.  The report will include a generic solution giving reasons why you should consider a particular solution(s) and why others may not be a good fit.

There will be plenty of links, in specially marked sections, that will point you to what we have to offer if you are interested.  The scoring that is done is not rocket science, but rather done in a simplistic way to try to emulate the project engineer’s thought process.   

So give this tool a try and let us know what you think. 

Once the process improvement work is complete, process owners typically assume everything will remain in an optimum state. However, future process adjustments, product changes or raw material substitutions can all lead to degradation in the recent process improvements or create entirely new problems.

As a closing step in the original corrective process, the customer can contract with the optimization engineers to provide some sort of automated monitoring to identify and ward off results erosion. The data collection systems used for the original diagnostics step are typically left in place, providing faster access to the data needed to analyze new issues as they arise, avoid results erosion and ensure that the improvement will be sustained.

“The process owner can choose to implement continuous monitoring of their systems by outside optimization engineers,” Murphy explains. “Continuous monitoring allows periodic reviews of the process and compares it to the benchmarks established in the test phase. Where the customer will allow a network connection to their process, optimization engineers can rely on remote monitoring to gain visibility to the system at any time and from any place. This enables the optimization engineers to monitor the performance of the system and provide remote consulting.”

These remote connections are typically accomplished via the Internet. While there is tremendous value in this remote access, these links should never be established before potential security issues are thoroughly considered and addressed. The process must be protected from hackers, viruses and other attackers.

The customer can negotiate the appropriate outside services to sustain the improvement in their process, and can select weekly or monthly remote assessments of system performance. If the optimization engineers detect results erosion or new potential issues, they can address them proactively, often before the issue is evident in product quality. They can often aid or direct the customer’s in-house process experts to help them quickly resolve the problem.

Check back next week for summary and download link for the complete white paper and as always, we look forward to your comments.

My colleague Luis Duran, Product Marketing Manager for ABB’s Safety Product Group, is preparing for a seminar in a few weeks and ran into a few ideas he wanted to share…

 “It is critical for an operator to sustain a high level of alertness and understanding of the progress through the production cycle during the slow times and, at the same time, have real-time access to critical information in context to be able to make correct decisions immediately when circumstances dictate. This is the challenge operators’ face in the process industries and the reason why operational errors are the highest single cause for unscheduled slowdowns and shutdowns.”

 - Paul Miller & Dave Woll, ARC Analysts

Without running the chance of affecting independence and other fundamental design criteria, operators should be able to access information seamlessly from a multitude of plant systems (including safety systems) in order to perform their function, to run the plant in a safe and productive fashion where timely decision making in the case of abnormal conditions prevents hazardous conditions, equipment malfunction and process downtime.

It should be normal and easy to access alarm and events from anywhere in the process (coming from the process control or safety systems) and to seamlessly react to diagnostics, assess initiating events from sequence of events data or from the safety system in the context of other relevant information in the process historian in order to take appropriate corrective action.

It’s maybe a surprise for many that IEC61511/ISA 84 considers this also…

“The operator should be given enough information on one display to rapidly convey critical information. Display consistency is important and the methods, alarm conventions and display components used should be consistent with the BPCS displays.”

Even when discussing and analyzing the causes of the troubles in the Fukushima nuclear power plant from the viewpoint of instrument control engineer, this subject was mentioned.

“The design of protective control in the future must include design principles that prevent errors, even in unpredictable events. It must also supply measurement data in a way that provides operators with the correct information..”

 - Toshiaki Itoh, formerly of Mitsubishi Chemical and current SICE Fellow

 If you are wondering about the seminar, it’s on the topic of integration of safety and process control and it’s coming to a computer near you.  The webinar is on December 8^th – look for the registration information on this blog and in an upcoming newsletter from Control Engineering.  We look forward to hearing your opinion on this topic.

In a previous post, I noted that there are 6 core technologies that, together, make it possible to achieve the fully integrated operating environment for process industries that ARC Advisory Group refers to as CPAS: Collaborative Process Automation Systems.

Here they are: 

1. Marriage of Object-Oriented Design with Aspect Oriented Programming: When an object – any plant asset from a controller to a programmable relay – is entered into the DCS system, its operating variables – aspects – can be replicated or customized across the entire system. It allows for efficient programming of non-native devices via the DCS architecture.

2. Thin-client architecture: It’s not new, but it enables the benefit of Object-Oriented Design and Aspect Oriented Programming. It allows allow configuration of assets from a single location, while individual workplaces can be customized as needed for each operator/user. In some cases, adding a piece of field equipment to the network can literally be a drag-and-drop operation.

3. Electrical integration: The biggest integration gap may be the divide between process automation and power management. Rising standardization of electrical systems around IEC 61850 now makes it possible to design DCS platforms that integrate things like circuit breakers and transformers as consistently as switches, pumps and valves.

4. Fieldbus standardization and wireless networks: At the field level, standardization provides gains in interconnectivity that allow a DCS platform to be more flexible in the variety of devices and protocols it can accommodate.

5. OPC Unified Architecture: At the application level, adoption of the OPC Foundation’s Unified Architecture standard makes it easier for a DCS to connect with third-party DCS controllers and PLCs. Once connected, data flows seamlessly, allowing an operator to view every object as if it was part of the native system.

6. State-based control operating strategy: Built on the principle that facilities operate in definable process states, state-based control categorizes those states and provides automated responses when they change. It relies on the improved systems integration to quickly deliver improved productivity, safety, quality and financial results.

Which of these technologies are being applied by your process control system?

In case you missed it, the FDI Cooperation has been formalized as a company!  On September 26, FDI Cooperation, LLC was formalized. For those of you perhaps not yet familiar with FDI (Field Device Integration), it has been a cooperative group of the five major automation foundations that has accepted the task to create a single, unified solution for integrating intelligent management of field devices into automation systems. The five foundations are: FDT Group, Fieldbus Foundation, HART Communications Foundation, Profibus & Profinet International, and OPC Foundation.

End users win! Finally there is an end in sight for competing solutions for device management. For some time now, FDT, and EDDL, have been battling it out for attention from users. FDI has the promise to combine the best of FDT and EDDL for a single, unified solution. When the initial work is completed, device manufacturers and automation system suppliers will have the chance to start down a path of only one device integration methodology. Rather than needing to limit device selections according to which interface methodology the control system might support, or needing to have two different solutions inside one system that might confuse the users more than help them, a unified solution will begin to take shape. 

According to the September 27th press release, the new company has three primary objectives:

• Complete the standardization of FDI under the IEC (International Electrical Commission)
• Manage the FDI specification, and
• Finalize the FDI toolkits for system and device manufacturers.

The company will be managed by representatives of the five foundations and seven of the leading automation suppliers. Hans-Georg Kumpfmüller from Siemens will serve as Chairman of the Board and Achim Laubenstein from ABB has been nominated as Executive Director

It appears that the FDI Cooperation does not yet have its own website, but you can read more about the technology, its background, and how it will likely be implemented at Control Engineering.

While the expertise and resources brought to bear by the optimization engineers are useful in diagnosing issues, their greatest value is realized in implementing the found improvements and ensuring their sustainability.

The implementation plan provided should provide recommendations for resolving performance issues and/or the steps required to maximize performance. Based on the testing results, these recommendations can include adjusting, replacing or upgrading equipment, or configuration changes like fixing incorrect settings or mismatched firmware revisions.

The recommendation typically includes a number of potential improvements or changes. To guide the customer, each recommendation should be ranked or rated, including an expected Return on Investment.

Beyond the basic process remedies, there are many other facets of a thorough implementation plan. It should specify activities going forward that are targeted on improved stability, efficiency and consistency in maintaining the system. Revised maintenance practices and procedures should be developed and conveyed to the process owner for implementation.

The implementation plan should also identify environmental issues that may adversely affect the satisfactory future performance of the process. Corrective action should be defined so that the process owner can take the appropriate corrective action.

Finally, the plan should include recommendations for any training required by the customer to ensure that their personnel have the necessary skills and knowledge to maintain the process improvements implemented.

Depending on the scale of improvements identified in the implementation, the OEM or third-party process improvement expert may present the implementation plan in a phased approach. Presented with a prioritized list of potential improvements, the customer can immediately implement the highest-return activities and delay the lower-value activities until time and budget constraints permit implementation.

Check back next week for the “third way” and as always, we look forward to your comments.

Paper Mill Optimization Savings Add Up. One of the three machines at papermaker’s South Carolina facility wasn’t able to transition quickly enough between products. As a continuous process, this meant mountains of off-spec material was produced during the transition. ABB Optimization Services experts relied on the Transition Fingerprint process to identify both hardware and software issues. Following optimization, transition time was reduced from 33.4 to 23.3 minutes, generating material, energy and other savings of $387K/year.

Conduct a Test Plan

The data may reveal issues in a variety of places. It could be found in:

• Process instrumentation, the devices that measure production parameters
• Process controllers, the software that looks at the instrumentation, compares it to a target, and calculates the desired actuator setpoint change
• Process actuator, the motors, pumps, valves or other mechanical devices.

Based on the type of process, and the location and type of issued detected, the optimization engineers will develop a test plan that may include invasive and/or non-invasive tests.

The first course of action is non-invasive testing which involves collecting process data during normal production, with no changes introduced by the optimization engineers. This is a useful testing approach, but it may not be able to isolate the individual process interactions needed to identify a specific process issue. If non-invasive testing doesn’t provide the needed results, invasive testing is employed.

“One of the most common tests is a step test,” Tran says. “Optimization engineers vary the independent variable – their “prime suspect” – up and down to see how it affects the dependent variable, the condition or parameter related to the process problem.”

While the word “invasive” sounds like this test involves a major process disruption, the testing is coordinated with the customer to limit the magnitude of changes made so that the process remains within the current product specifications. That means little or no off-specification product will be created during the testing.

The results of the step test are often represented visually in a performance curve showing the interaction of the two variables. In some cases the performance curve takes the shape of a V. The point of the V indicates that there is one optimum condition or operating point for the independent variable. A bowl-shaped curve indicates that there is a broad range of conditions for the variable that will provide satisfactory production performance.

The performance curves provide continued benefit at end of the problem resolution process. The pre-improvement curve can be readily compared to the post-improvement curve to confirm the success of the effort, or to point out the need for continued problem correction.

“The success rate of optimization engineers after the first test is generally very high,” Murphy says, “in the 80% success range. However, there are always cases where the first test plan generates more questions than answers. It is sometimes, therefore, an iterative process, requiring a reconfiguration of the data gathering or a second attempt at correlating the data to the production issue.”

Check back next week for the “second way” and as always, we look forward to your comments.

Optimization engineers from the OEM or third-party service organization are typically selected for an assignment based on their experience with the specific process. Process generalists don’t have the in-depth knowledge to most efficiently analyze and correct process issues. These process specialists arrive on site equipped with an in-depth equipment and process familiarity that enables them to approach their investigation in the most efficient manner possible and quickly develop appropriate solutions.

Collect Data

Diagnosing the problem requires a series of steps that begins with data collection. The optimization engineers’ objective is to gather as much data as possible. More data generally provides better results, leading to a faster and higher-value process improvement.

“They first determine whether usable data already exists,” says ABB Senior Optimization Engineer Pete Tran. “Most useful data may be stored in a data historian, an archiving tool that captures and stores information for later analysis. Unfortunately, most process owners maximize the amount of data their historian stores by removing much of the detail needed for problem analysis. While the historical data may be of no use, optimization engineers can easily reconfigure the customer’s historian to begin collecting new, uncompressed data.”

Most process automation systems installed in the last 10 to 15 years are OLE for Process Control (OPC)-based. This data communication standard makes it very simple to download process data from any OPC-compliant device or system.

There are still many proprietary process control systems in use, containing possibly useful - but non-standard - data. Experienced optimization engineering firms have converters or translators that enable them to access the data resident in these legacy systems.

“There may also be off line data, such as the results of the regular product testing done in a lab environment,” according to Tim Murphy, Senior Optimization Engineer, ABB Services. “However, this data is typically not very useful. Online data taken directly from the process is captured in a steady stream at a relatively high sample rate of one data measurement every second or five seconds. Lab data, on the other hand, tends to be more along the line of one sample every hour.”

Look for Correlation

While data collection requires special expertise, it is the easy part of the process and within the abilities of most process owners. What they lack is the analysis tools and expertise to turn that data into information that enables analysis. The raw data is nothing but that: masses of numbers. In the hands of skilled optimization experts, those numbers hold the answers to maximizing process performance. Teasing out those answers is a complex undertaking.

“The optimization engineers process the data to help visualize issues, making patterns or trends more apparent,” says Kevin Starr, R&D Manager, ABB Process Automation Services. “The human eye is very good at identifying problems when they are properly visualized. It‘s like a doctor reading an x-ray. There‘s no numerical analysis of the bone to say it‘s broken. Rather, it‘s all visual. The same concept applies for the validation and verification of a pattern in the data.”

Using a variety of mathematical, statistical and analytical tools, optimization engineers search for data points or trends that relate to the occurrence of the problem. One of the most commonly used tools is cross-correlation, based on the search for a certain pattern in the data that relates to a process variable: “When A occurs, B also occurs.”

“The investigation process generally narrows the hundreds or thousands of potential problem points to a very small number of variables, typically one or two,” says Tran. “Even in complex processes where many things can affect quality, it’s possible to narrow the field of candidates to isolate the suspect variables or factors that have the potential to elevate performance and quality. At this point, those variables are still only suspects, innocent until proven guilty through process testing.”

Check back next week for the rest of the “first way” and as always, we look forward to your comments.

In the November 9^th reports from Invensys OpsManage’11 event in Nashville, it was interesting to read about attending executives making statements about control loop to business loop integration like …

“Maintaining the links between the process control and the enterprise level is what leads us to profitability.” – Travis Capps, Valero Energy

“These days, you have to understand the overall business you’re in, follow the value chain and the dollars, and get up to speed on making better decisions.” – Bob Baird, Husky Oil Ltd.

“One word, collaboration. Plant systems have to connect with the business. One person can’t do it all, so they need to understand the business, but then move to involve everyone else at the plant, IT and business levels.” – Rich Van Dyke, Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo

On at least one item that most of us would agree as being important in business today, these guys really get it. And I will venture that top executives across most of the world’s leading companies do too. So given this important role that automation is playing, why is plant automation still typically specified and bought on technical details, in a totally disjointed manner, and frequently at the cheapest price when the business executives want best in class results from their enterprises?

What these executives seem to be expecting is integration that goes well beyond getting data values out of historians and into enterprise accounting systems. They want solutions that …

• Deliver on real operator effectiveness so that the people sitting at the controls to quality and production on a 24/7 basis are making decisions driving profitability through collaboration, not simply responding to abnormal conditions.
• Manage direct production costs that include electricity and other energy that requires real time integration of the electrical systems and an eye to identifying wasted energy like traditional control valve flow control designs.
• Actively focus on HS&E demanding that process safety be integrated directly into the automation design.
• Provide facility asset health information that goes well beyond the field instrumentation and can provide real time knowledge that can impact maintenance practices and directly affect OEE performance on large scale assets.
• Deliver on real integration of the islands of automation that exist in most facilities so that not only do operators have consolidated, complete control, but there is a single source of data for related operations.
• Deliver on bi-directional integration of data between the plant floor and enterprise systems designed in a manner to evolve with changing demands and technologies while controlling life cycle costs associated with maintaining those interfaces.

To accomplish this goes well beyond the traditional automation scope where only the control system is a consideration and other critical areas like electrification, drives, safety systems, instrumentation, and IT integration are traditionally dealt with separately and as unrelated topics, if at all. Companies that want to have best in class control loop to business loop integration need to take an integrated approach to acquiring the best automation solutions and that will start from within by building system requirements integrated across disciplines and to business needs. The power of integration can work to your advantage in many ways.

Last month I introduced the first of the new white papers from our ABB Service organization.  Today, we begin with the first installment of the next paper on a topic that impacts us all - "Improving your Production Process".

Here is the introduction of this topic ***************************

Automation systems are designed to provide safe, reliable service for many years. But, as will all mechanical and electrical equipment, performance will degrade over time. No production process runs well forever. Due to the normal wear of the production equipment, the process will eventually begin producing off-specification product. The process may also respond poorly to changes in operating parameters, materials or environmental conditions, also leading to sub-optimum performance.

 Not so long ago, facility managers had access to a staff of experienced process engineers within their organization. These process improvement experts devoted their time to analyzing production processes. They could be relied on to keep processes optimized, and uncover opportunities to increase efficiency, reduce costs, accelerate processes and improve quality.

 Unfortunately, the payback for their efforts was sometimes not readily apparent or not realized quickly enough. Faced with increased competitive pressure and the need to very tightly manage costs, many of these process experts were let go or given other assignments that offered a faster or more easily identified return on investment.

 Plant managers, however, still need access to the unique technical skills and knowledge required to maintain their process efficiency and effectiveness. They can turn to the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) or other third-party optimization experts to provide assistance. These outside resources can be called on to solve acute process problems or issues, and to uncover opportunities to elevate a well running process to even higher levels of performance.

 Every manufacturing process has problems or issues of varying severity that reduce productivity, lower product quality and increase operating costs. Every process presents opportunities for improvements with measurable and often impressive results.

Identifying process improvement opportunities requires a three-step process:

• Diagnose the process
• Implement improvements
• Sustain performance

 This three-step process is applied by optimization engineers to better understand a customer problem or need, identify and implement corrective action, and ensure that the improvements are maintained over time.

Check back next week for the first of the three steps.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic.

I was told that the Safety Automation Market (Safety Systems) was not as “dynamic” as the regular Process Automation Market (DCS/BPCS) and that requirements didn’t change as fast or as often.

However, I feel those voices overlook changes to the safety standards. As an example, and as you probably know, there is a new edition (Edition 2) of IEC61508 that takes effect in January 2012 and there is a vote for a new revision to IEC61511 late this year.

January 1,  2012, Happy New Year and someone moved my cheese…

There are new concepts related to criteria to meet a given Safety Integrity Level added to IEC61508 Edition 2 that might affect compliance of installed or legacy systems, in simple terms redundancy is not enough. I’ll briefly touch on Systematic Capabilities and leave other changes to future discussions.

The new edition to the standard requires the product (hardware, software or both) to be assessed for its systematic capabilities.

 This means:

1)   the system engineering environment needs to provide sufficient mechanism to ensure implementation according to the product’s safety manual or,

2)  following guidelines from IEC61508 3.5.9 Note 3, a systematic capability figure (SC 1 to 4) for an element, with respect to the specified element safety function, the systematic safety integrity of SIL (1 to 4) has been met when the element is applied in accordance with the instructions specified in the compliant item safety manual for the element.

3)  these requirements will lead modern safety system vendors to introduce hardware and software measurements to guide or enforce implementation in compliance to the product’s safety manual.

So, long story short.  Change is good and necessary and if you don’t believe me ask Sniff and Scurry.

How often did you review systematic capabilities of your safety platform back in the late 1990’s?  Let us know your challenges and opinions.  Things are changing and we’d like to hear from you.

There is no avoiding the need to make ongoing investments in all aspects of safety: equipment, processes, systems and people. But not all investments are the same. While some require long-term planning and capital budgets, others are small and fast. And still others have already been made, and are waiting to be utilized and optimized.

By focusing on these five areas:

• Increasing utilization of automation
• Decreasing utilization of alarms
• Considering human factors
• Understanding the role of redundancy
• Mapping the competence of people

Most process companies can unlock hidden safety improvements, and in many cases increasing operating effectiveness, without disrupting ongoing operations or making large investments.

I hope you have found this series of postings interesting and informative.  To download the entire white paper – click here.  As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and comments!

Today, I have an interesting post courtesy of our friend Martin Hollender from ABB's corporate research group in Germany.  Martin has been doing some work on the IEC 62682 Alarm Management standard and he was good enough to share his thoughts with us.

********************

The report of the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board about the Methyl Chloride Release (January 22, 2010) in the DuPont Belle plant in West Virginia found that problems with alarms were a major factor contributing to this accident (The report can be downloaded here: http://www.csb.gov/assets/document/CSB Final Report.pdf). As a response to the accident, the US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) recommends to “Establish and implement a corporate alarm management program as part of the DuPont PSM Program, including measures to prevent nuisance alarms and other malfunctions in those systems.“

With alarm management regulation getting tighter, standards defining alarm management become essential.  The probably most well-known alarm management guideline is EEMUA 191 (EEMUA - The Engineering Equipment & Materials Users’ Association - is a non-profit membership organization headquartered in London) which was first published in 1999. This document has had an enormous influence on alarm management, but as the name says, it is only a guideline and not a normative standard.

Later ISA developed the standard ANSI/ISA 18.2 which was published in 2009 (see http://www.isa18.org). The ISA 18.2 committee has wide representation from users, vendors and consultants and is co-chaired by Donald Dunn and Nick Sands. The purpose of ISA 18.2 is to establish terminology and practices for alarm systems, including the definition, design, installation, operation, maintenance and modification and work processes recommended to effectively maintain an alarm system over time.

ISA 18.2 defines three suppression mechanisms:

●  Shelving is typically initiated by the operator, to temporarily suppress an alarm.

●  Suppressed by Design is a mechanism implemented within the alarm system that prevents the transmission of the alarm indication to the operator based on plant state or other conditions.

●  Out-of-service is the state of an alarm during which the alarm indication is suppressed, typically manually, for reasons such as maintenance.

The terms “suppressed by Design“ and “out-of-service“ might sound a bit unfamiliar, but given the fact that each control system vendor defines terms like “disable“, “inhibit“ and “blocked“ a little bit different, it was necessary to define new vendor-neutral terms.

The standard requires that all alarms currently shelved, suppressed by design and out-of-service can be listed. Alarms must be under access control to be placed out-of-service. If an alarm is placed out of service this needs to be recorded.

Currently the working group (WG) 15 of the IEC Technical Committee 65A is working on a new international standard IEC 62682 “Management of Alarm Systems for the Process Industries“. This working group is also led by Donald Dunn and Nick Sands and starts from the existing ISA 18.2-2009 document. Current members of the working group come from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan, Norway, UK, and the US with backgrounds mainly in Oil & Gas, Chemicals and Control Systems. The group ensures that the standard can be used internationally.

One good example is the term “process safety“ which inside the US is known as a well-defined regulation, promulgated by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but outside the US this term is often not seen in that context. Besides this “internationalization“ of the document, new eyes looking on the document help to improve it, for example by making it more precise and consistent. These improvements will be fed back to ISA 18.2 via the national US committee.

In the next months and years, alarm management will be more and more required by legislators.  Inside the US, ISA/ANSI 18.2 is already a good basis for legislation and IEC 62682 will be the legal basis for alarm management worldwide.  It will become a must for all safety critical plants.

One well-worn, under-attributed statistic in process safety automation is that machinery is typically the cause in 10 percent of failures; the other 90 percent of the time, human error is to blame.

Lack of a source for this statistic notwithstanding, few people seem to argue the point that human error is the least predictable and more common source of breakdowns in safety.

With that in mind, John-Erlend Stromme, Service Manager, ABB Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Business Unit, , suggests that any company would benefit from a routine and systematic review of the way safety competence is built and maintained among its people.

“Competence is simply being aware that you are doing things right. A small mistake can start the ball rolling, and anytime we, as an industry, find ourselves looking at a major accident, it seems that’s ultimately how it started,” Stromme says.

Competence, however, is not simple. It’s a combination of having the right technical knowledge, knowledge of work processes and experience for whatever situation an individual may face.

“It’s not just knowing what you’re doing, but knowing how to follow procedures so you can avoid making an error you didn’t know about,” Stromme says.

Facets in mapping competence include documenting the type of education each worker has received, and what kind of experience, detailed to specific tasks and technologies.  Requirements and certifications in specific work environments are considered as well.

More difficult but equally important, he notes, is to map an individual’s attitude to reducing risk and conducting high-risk work. “People around him will know whether he’s someone who tends to make a situation more or less safe. Whether you can get that information or not goes to the culture of the company: Do they dare to tell you,” he says, “or do they dare not to tell you?

“When you take seriously this process of understanding the competence of each worker, as an individual, that says a lot about the importance of safety in an organization,” Stromme says. “You’ll get the level of information that you have earned, based on past experiences that your people have. If you demonstrate an open mind and attitude – that people won’t be punished, and that information will be used to help everyone become better and safer at their job – you are already doing a very good job of reducing risk in your operation.”

Check back next week for the summary and link to download the entire white paper.  And as always, we look forward to your comments.

Way 4 also includes some comments by yours truly, so I guess maybe I am doing a little self-promotion!

Here is the 4th installment********************

Redundancy is not equivalent to safety, and safety does not require redundancy. “People get the two confused,” laments ABB’s Huffman. “People get locked into thinking that if they’re going to have a safety system, it has to have full logic solver redundancy, often to 3x or 4x levels, in order to be safe.” That means they have to invest in a second set of equipment that is going to require regular testing and maintenance, and if all goes well they’re never going to use it.

“It’s not a true statement” Huffman says. “You can have single-element safety systems that can be certified up to SIL 3 levels.”

When a single-processor system detects a process problem that justifies tripping the plant, then it’s designed to lead the plant through a safe shutdown. In the case of an internal fault, it will also shut down the process safely, per SIL 3 safety requirements.

“In that case,” Huffman says, “I’ve lost the process, not because of a process problem, but because of a fault in the system. If you want to keep the process running, then redundancy is a matter of maintaining uptime, but not process safety.”

Sometimes, keeping the process running is important for personnel safety, Huffman says, because certain startups and shutdowns can put people at risk. But that’s a different decision than the process safety itself.

Huffman’s point is that companies pay for logic solver redundancy in cases where the investment might have more impact elsewhere, whether in other areas of safety or in operating efficiency.

His recommendation is that companies pay to put at least one person, who is respected at the executive level, through some level of basic safety education, such as the ISA’s EC50 course on Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS). Then use that education as part of the decision-making process around investments in safety and process automation. Having this knowledge can help with making system selections based on key performance requirements rather than the redundancy architecture of the logic solvers.

Check back next week for the fifthof the five ways.  And as always, we look forward to your comments.

 

 

If alarm management tends to place too much reliance on people, human factors explore the issues created by the fact that people are the most fallible part of a safety system.

Human factors typically include such areas as the design of interfaces and displays, lighting, noise management, staffing, safety-critical communications, ergonomics and, as already discussed, alarm management.

“In human factors, a key issue is that people are overloaded with information. When something goes wrong, the system is not well-enough designed to allow time for reaction. It doesn’t direct people where to look for the information they need,” says Chris Greaves, business manager at ABB Consulting. “While that is obviously relevant to alarm management, it also applies to the other human factor areas.”

As an example, Greaves says it’s common practice for work permits in a facility to be managed in the control room. “The argument is that if people want to get work done, they need to check in with the process superintendent.” The commotion related to issuing work permits can be a safety distraction to operators, Greaves argues, but he has seen instances where lighting was used to minimize the disruption, by darkening that part of the room where permits are issued when lighting is not required.

Other human-factor techniques can include providing different audible tones for different types of alarms, or automated redirection of lighting to focus on the correct displays during alarm bursts. Ventilation – maintaining a temperature that keeps people comfortable but alert – is a common challenge in many control rooms, Greaves says.

“As with anything, you can quickly get into a project that suddenly would have people writing large checks for fancy displays and ergonomic chairs,” he notes. “There are certainly times when this is justified and prudent, but if you’re talking about ways to improve operations and reduce safety risk, you simply cannot overlook these human factors. The control room is your last line of defense, and for many companies, it would be very easy and affordable to find multiple opportunities to change the environment in a way that helps the people who work there to do a better job.”

Check back next week for the fourth of the five ways.  And as always, we look forward to your comments.

Here’s a simple way to know if your alarm management system is doing its job well: Count the total number of alarms that the system activates during the course of a month and divide it by the number of operator hours worked during the same month.

If the total comes in at much more than 6 alarms per operator hour, then your system is running at an unnecessarily high level of risk and inefficiency.

That rule of thumb (6 alarms per operator hour) is just a guideline, warns Ken Praprost, alarm management optimization engineer at ABB. It’s far simplified from ISA- 18.2, a new standard released in 2009 that addresses alarm management in process industries.

“During an “alarm flood” period, you may get alarms at five or ten times that rate,” Praprost says. But six per hour per operator is one metric let you know if there’s a reason to go back to work on the alarm management system.

In Praprost’s experience, most companies deliver too many alarms, falling into three categories:

• Nuisance alarms: Those that go on and off so routinely that they eventually get ignored, like an alarm that sounds whenever process temperature rises above a threshold, even if the process generally takes care of itself before operators intervene. Praprost has frequently seen operations where there are so many standing alarms that they can only be viewed on multiple screens. “And many of these may be for equipment that’s not even in use. The flow is zero, which sets off an alarm that the operators simply have to look at.”
• Standing alarms: Those that remain in an active alarm state for a significant period of time.
• Non-alarms: Many alarms are really just events or data that someone in the organization had wanted recorded.

In all three instances, operators struggle to identify important alarms, especially when alarms are not prioritized – a common condition everywhere.

Fixing it can improve safety and potentially improve plant performance, Praprost says. “If we can get the alarm system so it’s not providing useless information that operators don’t need to know, the operators can do a better job running the plant. They can avoid lost-production events simply because they didn’t pick out the right alarm from a long list of alarms that all look the same.”

The main steps to improving an alarm management system are:

• Evaluate documentation and interview operators, engineers and supervisors: Investigate whether the systems operate as required and if personnel know why each alarm is triggered, precisely how to respond to it, and know how easy it is to interact with the system interface.
• Performance assessment: A review of alarm data over an appropriate period of time (usually a few weeks to a month) to determine the rates, frequency of individual alarms, and response times to alarms.
• Benchmarking: Comparison of results with industry guidelines.
• Recommendations for improvement.
• Plan and implement an improvement program.
• Establish an appropriate monitoring and review process.

“One thing we’ve learned is that people like to put an alarm on anything. If we investigate further, we can reclassify many of the alarms as events so they don’t occupy space on the list. Then we reprioritize to identify the true high-priority items,” Praprost says.

There are also strategies for dealing with nuisance alarms, vastly reducing how often they trip while assuring that they do appear when intervention is required.

Evaluating such issues is a process independent of the type of system being used. While it requires some cost, it can be conducted with minimal interruption and meaningful improvements in the way processes are managed. It not only brings significant improvements in plant safety; alarm rationalization can make a significant impact to the bottom line by reducing unnecessary plant trips.

Check back next week for the third of the five ways.  And as always, we look forward to your comments.

The support for this subject seems to be growing, at least based on the increasing number of articles and whitepapers that are starting to surface in a very short timeframe. For those of you that might be following this line of thought to energy and capital cost savings, here are few that have surfaced in recent days …

Dick Caro has a follow-on article to the one he did in March, 2011 in the latest edition of Control:  “Pursuing Sustainability with VFDs, We’ll never replace the control valve, or will we?” (Control, September, 2011, p. 75).  Dick provides some key background information and also insight into some of his research and survey information on the subject.  For those that missed or might want to refer back to Dick’s first article, it was “Eliminating the Control Valve,” (Control, March, 2011, p. 65)

As you might expect, SustainablePlant.com is great place to go for a hot topic like energy savings. Last week, Veerasamy Venkatesan had an article included on “Don’t Overwork Pumps and Fans: Part 1,” (sustainableplant.com, September 23, 2011 02:29:11 pm).  The same article previously appeared on ChemcialProcessing.com.  Veerasamy gives some pointers on how to make some very quick observations throughout your own facility to see just how much energy is being wasted. He provides a few easy examples, not just for where VFDs might be applied instead of control valves, but also for some practical solutions using basic control design improvements.  Given the name of his article, I am looking forward to Part 2.

This is the first installment of the white paper I introduced in my last blog posting.  Just so you don't think I'm too narcissistic, I was actuallly interviewed for this white paper, I am not referring to myself in the third person! 

Please enjoy the first way installment **********************

When a process is running, a well-designed automation system can deliver more reliability, repeatability and speed than any human being, according to David Huffman, a manager at ABB with background in chemical and process engineering. The control system can identify when processes change states, and can be programmed to act before those changes become critical.

“Chemical engineers like myself like to think you can put yourself at a steady-state process,” Huffman says. “But trust me, you’re never at a steady state. It’s a misnomer. Processes are always changing.”

Typically, an alarm management system is used to identify such changes, turning over the details of what to do about it to human operators.

“Obviously, there are times when that must happen,” Huffman says. “But there are many other times when nothing is really going wrong. There are some changes that the automation system is capable of identifying and managing if it’s programmed properly.”

As an example, Huffman describes a distillation process that requires the product to move through one of three drying beds. The beds are rotated through primary, secondary and regeneration modes.

“So you’re running full and at about the time you have to switch one bed offline, you find out there’s something wrong with another bed and you can’t put it back into service on time.”

The usual response is slowing down the distillation process while getting the troubled bed fixed. It’s a busy time for operators. “When you start scaling down a distillation tower, it loses efficiency, you lose product quality, and control loops don’t perform well at the reduced-rate condition. The operator is cutting flow rates, changing tower pressure, dealing with overhead systems, boiler systems etc. The more complex the tower is, the worse it gets. And the whole time, alarms are going off continuously.”

But, Huffman continues, “If you know this happens from time to time, you can record what the operator has to do and write a procedure around it for the automation to move the distillation process into a safer mode.”

There is an advantage in speed, which reduces product waste. And automating the routine around best practices means achieving the same results, even if the event occurs when your best operators are off-shift.

Most companies have dozens of examples like this, Huffman says – events that happen often enough to automate, but not often enough to have confidence that every operator is always going to be adequately trained and tested.

Admittedly, improving automation at this level isn’t easy or free. “You have to go through the pain and expense of understanding your routine states, defining them and putting in the programming code.”

Many companies overlook this step when implementing a new automation system. “There’s fatigue involved,” Huffman says.

“The company gets tired of spending money, and the people get tired of the constant change; they want to get back to a steady state too.”

The good news, he says, is that it means you still have opportunity to make big improvements long after you’ve grown comfortable with an automation system.

Quantifiable benefits include reduced staffing, less wasted product, increased quality and faster adjustment of controls at a level of higher precision and repeatability. With respect to safety, it removes distractions from operators, making routine events out of occurrences that would previously have set off an alarm flood.

Often discussed in the industry as state-based environments, the discipline of improving automation across a wider array of recurring events is the subject of a new ISA committee. While ISA-106, focused on sequential process control, is a few years away from releasing its first set of standards, Huffman says the goal is to “educate companies that processes run in states and, in order to keep them safe and profitable, it’s OK to take things out of operators’ hands and let the automation system do a lot more work.

“There are big companies that are embracing this because they are convinced it’s not only safer, but you can make money with it,” Huffman says.

Check back next week for the second of the five ways.  And as always, we look forward to your comments.

Our Service organization has been creating some extremely interesting white papers that I think you will all find useful.  I plan to share them here in installments over the next weeks and months.  The first one addresses a very tricky issue in the process industries - How to improve safety and profitability without disrupting operations.

Here is the first of 6 installments ******************

Process industries are inherently hazardous, and maintaining safety in processes and operations has become increasingly complex and costly. But too often, companies have difficulty demonstrating a clear return on investment in their safety activities. With both safety and financial concerns being a high priority, those in the process industry sometimes struggle to reconcile them.

In 1994, the world’s regulatory environment was still reacting to the Bhopal, India gas leak that had occurred a decade before.

At that time, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) undertook a study to figure out how much emerging safety regulations actually cost. It concluded that, across all industry segments and plant sizes, the average U.S. industrial facility would start at 40 percent compliance and spend no less than $5.8 million over a decade to effectively achieve full safety compliance.

The return on investment (ROI)?  The kind that gives financial executives gray hair: potential cost avoidance.

That was 27 years ago, and process safety management has since come a long way. First, ongoing investments are thought to be far higher than the AIChE had calculated – “upto one-third to one-half, or even more, of the capital and operating costs of the new plant handling the hazardous operations,” declares an abstract for another old study: The Real Cost of Process Safety – A Clear Case for Inherent Safety, published in November 2003 by Process Safety and Environmental Protection, the journal of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering.

But also important: the ROI is now known to be far more tangible than the “what-if” costs of an avoided incident.

Even 10 years ago, safety processes and technologies were being viewed for their impact on Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and plant efficiency. According to the results of a study by the Center for Chemical Process Safety, as cited in a 2001 workshop report, facilities that embed safety into their daily operations typically achieve a 5 percent productivity increase, 3 percent reduction in production expenses, 5 percent reduction in maintenance costs, 1 percent savings in capital expenses and 20 percent reduction in insurance costs.

The timeline sends a clear message: While the cost of safety in process industries has far exceeded estimates from the dawn of the modern safety era, the benefits of safety are more tangible and substantial as well.

The simple assessment is that most companies can increase manufacturing flexibility, profitability and overall competiveness while improving safety, with little disruption and minimal capital expenditure.

These savings arise across the process safety area, but we will focus here on those related to process automation. Many companies have paid for these potential benefits with process automation capabilities that now exist in-house but are being underutilized or ignored.

The trick is knowing where these potential gains are hidden. Here, according to ABB Process Automation safety experts, are five areas where most companies can easily unlock improvements in safety and, quite possibly, profitability.

Check back next week for the first of the five ways.  And as always, we look forward to your comments.

 

I spent the better part of 3 days last week at the ISA Sales & Marketing Summit in St. Louis, MO. The key focus, of course, was to explore how we suppliers can better market to the ever changing web-savvy customer now commonly identified as “Customer 2.0.”  By the very nature of the highly technical automation business where we interact, it is suggested that many of you may fit into this group. If you are not aware of the characteristics of this species, here are a few commonly recognized characteristics of Customer 2.0 …

1. Responds to honest, relevant messaging from peers and other trusted information sources and is less influenced by general corporate and product advertising.
2. Does not exhibit mass market buying characteristics. Deals in personal choices and looks for products and services that speak to them and their individual requirements.
3. Digests short, personal and highly relevant messaging while growing increasingly expert at blocking out what they consider spam.
4. Chooses to search for and consume what they find useful in their lives, desiring to have as much control over the flow of information as possible rather than being a slave to marketing campaigns.
5. Will speak about, re-purpose and associate with a brand as they see fit.

If you’re an influencer or purchaser of automation equipment for your company, is there a chance these characteristics of Customer 2.0 describe you?

If you can answer yes, I would appreciate your spending a few minutes sharing some information with me and the other readers of this blog in a kind of informal survey. As a customer in this space, what are the topics, issues, and concerns that you struggle finding valuable information from your suppliers? Without using supplier company names, what do you find works for you in the way us suppliers market and interact with you? And what turns you off? Are demos still important? Are face to face visits from your account representative important and how often is appropriate? Do you find videos valuable and if yes, what content is most valuable? Are there topics outside of the technical areas that you look for in a supplier like ethical performance, sustainability programs, or other social type topics that you need information about?  These suggested topics or anything else are fair game here.

Alright, I’ve typed enough on this one, now it’s your turn.  Thanks in advance if you participate.

I opened Monday’s Sustainableplant.com email and found a thought provoking article: Energy Efficiency: The Role of Theory in the Real World by Bill Holmes, P.E.  As you might guess, there is much more to the story than just energy theory. If you are struggling to realize energy savings in your processes, you will probably find the article interesting.

The concepts he discusses are around energy savings in buildings, but much of what he describes fits well with process facilities also.  One particular quotation from the article was key for me, “I think what jumps out at me as the two central issues that I have been dealing with for more than 35 years, are the gap between the theory, those in academia and design offices and those in the real world working with the energy systems on a daily basis, and second, the lack of monitored data and feedback to verify the system operation on a continuing basis.” 

In designing process facilities, a tremendous amount of effort and capital is spent on control, but frequently key measurements important to long term energy monitoring and other key operating parameters are often not available. 

From an automation perspective, much of the power of a control system is often left on the table simply due to a lack of investment in key instrumentation. The ability to monitor, calculate and report information is available in most systems today, providing the tools to build the necessary comparisons between theory and reality. But these features are seriously underutilized because the critical sensors were never installed.  As another quote from article highlights, “You cannot assume that the systems were designed for maximum energy efficiency, or if they were, know that the design had not been seriously compromised trying to stay within the construction budget.” By investing in the necessary sensors through a larger construction budget to get the data and in the time to use the tools provided to compare theory to reality, process facilities can probably realize many of the same results as Bill Holmes has in his businesses.

Just a quick plug about sustainableplant.com. If your key activities center around energy or other sustainability issues and you’re not already a subscriber, you might want to get to know this site.  Many of today’s issues on sustainability are covered on a daily basis with very good guest writers.

I was assisting with a response to an existing system upgrade RFQ last week and got to thinking that these documents really don’t help an enterprise choose an automation system for the right reasons. Granted, hardware and software details like engineering tool languages or the number of bits in A/D convertors have their place in the process, but none of those technical items can help the system owners determine what system will provide benefits to improve Return on Net Assets (RONA) for the company.

Is it possible that the reason RFQs don’t deal with the issues of RONA is that common justifications for upgrades are based on either the fear of a potential system failure, or avoiding the potential of ever increasing maintenance costs as spare parts start to become increasing scarce?

I know I have seen many instances where one or both of these is used and actual benefits to be derived from either of these approaches are extremely hard to quantify because they deal only with possible outcomes, not truly measurable events. So as a result of these far less than perfect justifications, projects are taking the easy and least cost alternatives to replace in kind as fast and inexpensively as possible.  Nearly every project done this way fails to deliver on any financial return to the enterprise. Frankly, it surprises me that the business managers within end user companies allow a new technology purchase to be applied in the same manner as previous technology was 10, 15 or more years ago with no discernable benefit to the enterprise other than “maybe avoiding a potential future cost.”

But what if RFQ  s sought out information on subjects like:

• How to decrease software maintenance costs by eliminating costly custom interfaces to enterprise software packages using standards based interfaces?
• Reducing costs in maintenance programs by redesigning reactive and scheduled maintenance into predictive programs based on integrated Asset Management applications that leverage the benefits of digital fieldbuses and reach far beyond instrumentation to larger plant assets like heat exchangers or mission critical networking infrastructures?
• Redesigning operator interface environments to create significantly more effective application of operator time and skills to move from what is commonly a manual, alarm-reactive environment to one with a true focus on product production, quality and KPI improvement?
• Gaining control over actual process energy management with integration opportunities created by recent enabling standards like IEC-61850 and hardware and software now available for complete integration of power and process automation?
• Taking advantage of fully integrated process and SIL safety designs to simplify engineering change management and gain synergy with shared resources to reduce hardware and support.

These items represent only a small portion of the opportunities that companies can invest in to turn their automation system replacement into a RONA generator. But “invest” is the key term. The benefits do not come for free and will not be available with inexpensive, low end selections. The key is to understand that the delta in upfront project capital is returned many times over and can deliver on measurable benefits. But to reach these results, the RFQ needs to focus on gaining the right information.

To reinforce the point that redundancy is not a safety issue, the marketplace already has products that can deliver SIL3 safety performance in non-redundant configurations. As fieldbuses evolve into safety networks, they too can be applied in SIL3 SIF applications using only single bus structures. And as the industry moves rapidly towards utilizing ethernet as a common communications backbone, we are seeing developments that allow ethernet to also be applied in SIL3 SIF instances. The key is to have the safety system properly execute when a demand is placed on it to do so. The key to safety is not redundancy!

Once the safety requirements are met, then process availability can be considered. This is the role of redundancy. Redundancy can maintain process availability when a fault occurs in safety system hardware and actually prevent a safe shutdown.  When a fault occurs in a non-redundant hardware configuration, the expectation would be to take the process to safe shutdown. In many businesses, such an interruption in availability can be very costly and redundancy becomes a business requirement. However, there are businesses where availability is not a key concern and in those cases, spending valuable capital on redundancy may be a poor business decision. We can also have the discussion around the idea that preventing a shutdown is a safety issue, as the most unsafe conditions are frequently shutdowns and startups. But we need to keep in mind the distinction between 1) demands that originate in the process and must be addressed with safety action and 2) faults that originate in automation hardware that may be addressed to prevent a safety action (if you have redundancy).

I expect that reliability and availability will long continue to be used in the discussion of safety automation systems. I just hope that we can all keep clear on what they actually represent within those discussions. I will also suggest that when you find yourself talking about safety automation architecture, and redundancy creeps into the conversation, just remember that “Redundancy is not a safety demand issue!”

Recently, I was in a meeting dealing with fieldbuses and their application to Safety Instrumented Systems (SIFs). I will note that it was a good discussion overall and I learned a few things, which is always good.  But during the exchange, we got a little sidetracked on a reliability / availability issue for a while - triggered by issues around redundancy.

To start with, I guess old habits die hard as neither of the words reliability or availability are actually “defined” as key terms in subsection 3 (Abbreviations and Definitions) of the ANSI/ISA-84.00.01-2004 Part 1 (IEC 61151-1 Mod) safety standard, yet they keep appearing in safety conversation. For those of you that may be purists, reliability seems to be used in many safety discussions as a substitute for Probability of Failure on Demand (PFD) or possibly for Safety Availability (1-PFD), and is not the “reliability” that is associated with Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) which is actually related to hardware “availability.”

But rather than maintaining these distinct differences where reliability references the probability that the safety action will occur when required, and availability references the fraction of uptime for the process, I often find that people use the two words interchangeably crossing definitions in both directions.

One reason for the confusion is the lack of familiarity with the safety standards. This is not something I want to address here, but I certainly do encourage anyone that touches safety automation in any way to take the time to get some basic education in this area (the EC50 ISA course or other resources).

But as today’s title suggests, redundancy plays a key part in creating the confusion also. In most applications of the words reliability and availability, they mean that things keep working or keep running, and it is easy equate having redundancy to achieving those conditions.  In recent years, I have met many colleagues that are of the opinion that the only way to achieve SIL3 reliability is through redundancy. Undoubtedly this comes from a history of marketing safety automation system architectures where the key discussion has been around Dual Modular Redundancy (DMR), Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR), and Quadruple Modular Redundancy (QMR) and the fault tolerance of each of these architectures. It has proven interesting to watch and see how fault tolerance or availability has become more important in the messaging than safety or reliability. I know that both are important, but when we are talking about safety, I want to suggest that we need to keep our focus on that part and how it is achieved in order to make safe products and safe solutions. An interesting whitepaper on how architecture of a system does not matter can be found on Control Global’s website.

Check back tomorrow for the rest of the discussion and leave comments with your thoughts and views.

Today I’d like to share an excerpt from the new ABB Review article on how ABB is helping extend the life of Boliden’s massive Aitik copper mine by making it more efficient.  This project perfectly illustrates the value and the power of integration.

“Some 1,000 km north of Stockholm, Sweden, past the Arctic Circle, lies an impressive open-pit copper mine, known as Aitik. Although the proportion of metal found at the Aitik copper mine is low – less than 0.3 percent – it is a highly profitable mine because it is run so efficiently. In fact, operations have recently become even more efficient – a $790 million modernization of the entire mining operation has enabled the mine operator Boliden to double its production capacity and extending the life of the mine to 2030. ABB has contributed to this success by supplying a range of products and systems to power and operate the entire site.”

Many technologies make up the solution at Aitik, but the whole thing is held together by ABB’s System 800xA extended automation system.  Integration is key not only used for the equipment on site (gearless mill drives, motors, substations etc.), but for applications such as maintenance systems and the document management system.

To learn more about the Aitik installation and the value they have achieved through integration, read the full story in ABB Review (go to page 56).  What do you find the most interesting?  The IEC61850 integration, controlling the plant through smart phones or asset optimization?  We’d like your comments.

Operator workplaces now have the ability to impact operator performance like never before.  Improving decision making is the focus of many in the process industries as a way to increase productivity and reduce production losses.

According to a new article published by Control Engineering, process industries globally lose around $20 billion annually due to process disruptions, which represents about 5% of total production. Studies suggest 80% of these losses are preventable, and of these preventable losses, 40% are primarily due to operator errors. This means that the total improvement potential—if a way can be found to help avoid mistakes—totals $6.4 billion.

Operator effectiveness is a fundamental element for sustaining the economic value of process control and management.  One place to begin the process is by empowering operators through improved situational awareness and better handling of abnormal conditions. Operators can then make better decisions and so improve safety and process uptime.

Is this something your company is focused on?  Are your operators empowered rather than hindered by their control system?  We’d like to hear from you.

We are nearly constantly bombarded with internet messages, news articles and advertising promoting the concepts of “going green,” or as many companies have now adopted the moniker of “sustainable operations.”  Regardless of the catch word or phrase, the message is all about reducing the energy we consume in our daily operations. Yet, in the midst of all this chatter, process and automation designers still continue to overlook a key combination of energy consumers in nearly every process design; pumps to move fluids and the control valves that regulate flow.

The pump-valve method of moving and controlling fluids has been around for a long time. And in every case, we apply far more energy to the process than is necessary to move the fluid from one location to another because the control valve consumes a large amount of the energy to control the flow. This design developed because motors, at the time, were designed to operate at a single speed, so to control the flow of the fluid, a control valve was required. Amazing though, we still see almost every new process facility being designed and built today using this same basic energy-wasting control feature.

In this time of sustainability, I find it hard to believe that this is still happening. The problem of a fixed speed motor was solved decades ago with the invention of variable speed or variable frequency drives (VFDs). I would guess that most of us that apply automation to processes are aware of these devices even if we perhaps don’t know much about them, but perhaps it’s time we learned. By varying the speed of the motor, we are able to vary the head produced by the pump which can be used to directly control the flow of the fluid without a control valve. As a result, only the necessary energy to move the fluid from one point to another is applied, saving upwards to 40% or more of the energy used today.  When you consider how many pump-valve combinations are installed across the world today, we are looking at a very large quantity of energy that could be saved.

VFDs are no longer bleeding edge technology. With energy reduction a key objective of almost every manufacturing company, it’s time to get onboard with a new design philosophy of using VFDs to eliminate the waste that control valves bring to the process. And for those brave enough to make the leap, there are a number of peripheral benefits: among them reduced capital requirements for the motors due to lower horsepower requirements, eliminating the capital cost of control valve stations (control valve, block valves, bypass valve, additional piping, welds, …); eliminate maintenance on the valves and in volatile hydrocarbon service, the testing and reporting required for the packings; and in many cases eliminating the need for gearbox capital costs and maintenance with the use of direct-drive motor configurations.

Granted, there are applications where control valves will still be required, but even if half the applications in new facilities or expansions were done with VFDs, there would be a very noticeable impact on energy usage, and capital and lifecycle costs for those of you willing to make such a change.

For those readers that may have already started down this path, why not share you success stories in the comment section of this blog so other readers might benefit from your experience.

In recent years, the choice between PLC and DCS for controlling processes has been blurring more and more in the perception of the system owners as the functionality of the two realms continues to overlap and grow together. Evidence of the ongoing battleground is present within a number of groups and discussions on LinkinIn.com right now. The term “hybrid”  has now been used for a number of years to describe the middle ground application space that seems to be looking for a clear winner to be able to select between the two choices.

Now there may actually be a little more “science” to help those of you trying to make this choice, especially those with needs that reach beyond basic control to include batch, ERP integration, redundancy and other higher function requirements.  A colleague of mine passed me this link to anarticle published on Control Engineering Europe Online in March, that those of you interested in this topic may find as an intriguing read.

Especially in those hybrid applications, the choice may seem obvious that lower cost hardware and software PLC systems would be the more cost effective solution.  However, the author covers seven (7) areas comparing and contrasting PLC and DCS characteristics on topics that go beyond the simple cost quoted in a response to a specification:

• System design
• Programming
• Commissioning and start-up
• Troubleshooting
• The ability to change to meet process requirements
• Operator training
• System documentation

The outcome may still not be “crystal clear,” but the results presented may help provide some insight into issues and concerns that many projects often overlook and neglect to consider when making the purchasing choice. 

Hopefully some of you will find this interesting and useful.  If you do, please join the conversation and comment back to me.  Others will be interested in your experience or perspective too, so please share. 

I was reading the most recent issue of Control magazine this morning and ran across the “Not your Daddy’s WBF: The Organization for Production Technology” article.  The idea of adapting batch standards for non-traditional applications is one that we’ve been exploring for many years (ABB together with The Dow Chemical Company).  It’s really great to see this change happening.

Object oriented Distributed Control Systems (DCS) can be configured to take advantage of batch strategies for continuous process control applications, bringing significant benefits in terms of safety and operational efficiency.  Check out our “Benefits of State Based Control” white paper to learn more (Executive Summary extract below).

“State Based Control is a plant automation control design based on the principle that all process facilities operate in recognized, definable Process States that represent a variety of normal and abnormal conditions of the process. State Based Control, implemented with the latest developments in object-based technologies, delivers direct benefits to its adopters in a variety of Operational Excellence categories. It results in productivity increases, higher asset utilization of both people and process, automated responses and recovery for abnormal conditions and provides an environment for knowledge capture directly into the control design.”

Has your company used state based control? Would you consider it?  Let us know your thoughts.

Today we have a report from an ABB guest blogger,Martin Hollender.  Martin is the author of the Collaborative Process Automation Book (CPAS) recently published by ISA.  He recently attended an OPC Day in Germany and had the following report:

"OPC Foundation Europe has held an OPC Day on May 25, 2011 at SAP Headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Interest was much higher than anticipated with more than 200 participants. Focus was on OPC-UA (Unified Architecture). Key advantages of OPC-UA are:

• A standardized, platform independent, and secure interface running over TCP/IP to all kind of devices, even small embedded controllers.
• An object modeling mechanism including a type system as a sound basis for the implementation of semantically rich domain models.
• OPC-UA comes both in high-performance and in firewall/internet-friendly flavors.

ABB’s Achim Laubenstein presented the Field Device Integration (FDI) cooperation which will harmonize the FDT and EDDL device integration technologies. FDI servers will be based on OPC-UA. Wolfgang Mahnke, author of the book OPC Unified Architecture presented OPC-UA information modeling capabilities with the example of analyzer device integration (ADI). ADI makes it much easier to integrate analyzers into process controllers and gives users more freedom of choice. ABB eXtended PAT (xPAT) support OPC-UA today and will support ADI in the near future.

The most remarkable thing about the OPC day was that it was hosted by SAP, a leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) vendor. In the past, an OPC day would have mainly attracted automation vendors and users. The ongoing success of the classic OPC standards combined with the superior new technical capabilities of OPC-UA make it an ideal glue technology between ISA95 layers 3 and 4. Therefore OPC becomes attractive for new players like ERP and MES vendors."

This is interesting on many levels.  What do you think of this trend?

I was recently listening to a program on NRP and learned that Justice Kennedy hates nothing more than nouns that are turned into adjectives or adverbs.  Hopefully, he won’t be reading this blog posting.  The “gamification” about to be discussed here refers to the use of gaming technology as a way to teach and engage younger operators in their tasks.

Today’s process graphics are organized in a hierarchical manner to make them efficient to navigate and locate, and means to optimize navigation and improve information visualization has been the goal of much human factors research. As the devices and control methods have improved, the process control systems now run most of the time fully automatically and require human intervention mainly in abnormal situations, e.g. when an oil pump fails on an offshore oil platform. This is referred to as an “irony of automation”: The automation introduces complexity that makes it more difficult for the human operator to intervene when that is needed the most. To manage an abnormal situation and prevent physical or financial damage, the operators need a deep understanding of the process and must know how to control it through the HMI. Operators are known to complain about the bipolar nature of their work: It is boring when nothing happens and very stressful when it does. New operators often start their on-the-job training on simulators and by working in the field. Familiarization starts by associating HMI elements shown on the screen to their real-life counterparts, such as the speed of a motor or the temperature in a tank.

Gamification may play a significant role in the process industry in future. It is important that the process industry takes advantage of effectiveness that games deliver when it comes to guidance and control. Who reads a user manual for a video game? And imagine all user manuals you have in process control plant. Games about traffic controller’s work (the Airport Madness series) and other professions are becoming popular; while psychological studies demonstrate the benefits that game-based training and incentive-based design have in demanding areas such as information security. As a generation shift from senior operators to the young gaming generation is taking place in the process industries, gamification may be a natural way to teach the next-generation of operators. Game-like front-ends to process control simulators could increase the operators’ motivation to understand the automated process on a deeper level beyond the obvious needs of a normal day

Game-like learning could also be well suited for the “boring hours” of automated process control, thus, operators would be better equipped to manage rare abnormal events.  Gamification of process control could be a way to keep operators and users awake andfocused.  Multi-player game-like virtual environments would, for example, encourage operators to achieve, explore and socialize in the simulated environment complete with organization-wide leader boards. This sort of gamification and simulation layer could act as a foundation for computer-supported collaborative learning in the process industry.

“Gamification” in the process industries; a good idea or just bad grammar?

Operator effectiveness was one of the hot topics at our recent Automation & Power World user’s group event in Orlando, Florida.  Thanks to our Corporate Research colleagues, we were able to show some fantastic new operator interface technologies.  Management meetings have never been so fun.  When you can use a 3D collaboration board to show all manner of information from plant KPI’s to process values and performance metrics, everyone stays engaged.  Martin Olausson and Susanne Timsjo literally tore the roof off of the plant they were demonstrating.  See Peter Weilander’s video interview with Martin and Susanne for more details.

Do you see value in this type of technology?  Let us know what you think.

Process controls and electrical system controls are notorious for not communicating well with each other.

But for industries that are sensitive to power – uch as oil and gas production, chemicals, mining, metal and pulp processing, and power generation – the reasons to integrate these systems are well established: to reduce energy costs and operating expenses, minimize downtime, increase operator effectiveness and simplify maintenance strategies.

There have been plenty of plant-level efforts to integrate process controls with electrical systems – based on hard-wiring signals between the electrical equipment and the process control system, and by building complex software gateways.

But these efforts are expensive, hard to maintain, nearly impossible to upgrade and tend not to work as well as envisioned.

The upshot is that, even though process controls and electrical systems need to work together, perfectly reasonable people throw up their hands at the thought of it actually happening.

Now that is changing, thanks to an unlikely and unglamorous intermediary: IEC 61850 – the international standard for automating substations.

The original goal of IEC 61850 (published in 2004) is to make it easier and less expensive to design, build, maintain and update substations. But open standards like this often come to have far broader reach than expected. Innovators figure out how to exploit them to do jobs well beyond their original scope.

And so it is with IEC 61850. It’s not a big leap to see how a standard designed to seamlessly integrate devices and data within the electrical system can be used to integrate the electrical and process control systems – so long as the process control platform is also built to work easily with IEC 61850.

That’s part of what makes ABB’s own System 800xA noteworthy: it’s the first process control system on the market to support IEC 61850 – meaning that it’s not just about process integration, but about whole-plant integration.

Thanks to the way IEC 61850 is written, it’s proving transformational. First, it’s a truly global standard, common for both IEC and ANSI.

Second, it provides a flexible open architecture for both medium- and high-voltage devices.

Third, it’s based on Ethernet communications. So it offers fast, reliable, and secure communications and interoperability among electrical devices – with flexibility to be adapted as new communication technologies arise.

All of this is why the most common description of the standard may be that it’s future-proof. And why people who think about broader integration issues than substation communication are starting to look at IEC 6850 as the standard for communication between any type of IED (intelligent electrical device).

Enough facilities have already used it to integrate electrical and process control systems that the innovation can no longer be considered experimental.

The results? Improved uptime; lower life cycle costs; and increased energy efficiency through better visibility into power consumption, integrated drives and faster plant startups. Problem resolution improves with a centralized plant maintenance system, and plant upsets can be addressed more quickly with a centralized sequence of events list.

A smaller system footprint can reduce spare part inventories, lower training time for users, and make for a simpler overall system design with fewer wires, yet more connectivity.

It remains to be seen where else IEC 61850 may be applied, but for large consumers of electricity, this boring technology standard starts to look pretty exciting.

Does your company utilize IEC 61850?

Best known for his work in management and leadership, Warren Bennis once said:

“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”

For as long as there has been work, there have been efforts to automate it. And for as long as there has been automation, there have been efforts to keep the man from touching the equipment.

But at some point human intervention becomes necessary. When it does, a safe operation assures the people are trained, informed and prepared to do their work quickly, smoothly and effectively.

So safety isn’t just about preventing accidents and injuries; it’s also about unscheduled downtime, asset utilization, avoidance and minimization of non-steady states – in a word, money. Processes that run safely also run cost effectively and increase the organization’s value.

That’s the role of an effective human interface –  the series of systems that let man and machine get along with the best possible results. Here are the keystones for that interface:

Integrated operations and systems: This matters at multiple levels. It involves integration of operating systems – seamless connections between control systems, power systems, data networks, PLCs, etc. But it also involves management systems: ERP and maintenance management as examples.

Integration doesn’t mean accessing multiple platforms with web-based interfaces; that takes time and requires knowledge in multiple systems. Real integration brings data and functionality from multiple systems into a single familiar interface. That means operators have fewer systems to learn and train on; they can access information quickly and easily when it’s needed; and they can focus on solving problems earlier.

High-performance environment: This helps operators to become aware of changing states earlier – often before the first warning. It includes such features as cool or grayscale graphics to improve visibility of alarms. It may involve redundant reporting – giving operators an ability to confirm data that may appear to be incorrect. It also includes situational awareness –putting data into meaningful context. (Did the temperature in a process rise gradually over time, or did it spike quickly?) Part of this, of course is alarm management. These capabilities avoid flood situations that can overwhelm operators – a situation that has been linked to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

Human factors: Work environments can be designed to maximize the effectiveness of operators. From displays to control panels to acoustics and work stations, control centers that are outdated or under-designed for their current use can cause confusion and slow response to legitimate alarms.

Operator competence: Many companies provide operators with generic training – teaching the concepts needed to manage abnormal situations. High-performance organizations train on the same interface that will be used on the job. The payoff is a significant reduction in alarms, and faster response when alarms do arise.

Many companies focus on one of two of these keystones. Only the best focus on all of them – with the result being a better safety record and improved financial results.

What do you think are the most important factors in creating a safe and efficient operation?

A new challenge was just posted today on The Business Advisor Challenge.  It seems like concerns over operator performance and safety are everywhere lately. This was even a topic at the last Center for Operator Performance (COP) meeting. 

 The challenge highlights a typical scenario faced by many companies today – how can you be assured that your operations are really safe and capable of handling abnormal states?  It will be very interesting to see what kind of advice the visitors to the site give in response to the challenge.  One thing is certain, the answer is not simple.

Check out the Business Advisor to add your advice and see more challenges.

Some of the most startling news lately – especially for those of us who travel often – is the apparent pandemic of air traffic controllers falling asleep or otherwise failing in their jobs.

It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

With thousands of control rooms around the world managing the 24x7 processes of oil refineries, chemical plants, power distribution systems and other facilities that do important, hazardous work, you have to wonder how many other people are falling asleep on at the control panel.

That’s because industrial control rooms and air traffic control rooms are similar in a couple key ways: They are being run by an ever-decreasing number of operators, and often, they are working in spaces that haven’t been designed with human factors in mind.

It doesn’t matter who you are; if you work an overnight shift – particularly alone – there’s a good chance you won’t always be at your best. It’s worse if you’re in an environment that is uncomfortable, lonely and depressing.

Not much appears to have been written about air traffic control room ergonomics. But from what little is readily available, ergonomic issues have been cited as a factor in some serious air crashes, including the deadliest accident in aviation history – the 1977 collision of two 747s on a runway in Tenerife.

Human factors in industrial control rooms are better documented, but many control rooms remain outdated and poorly designed.

A big issue is that many control rooms are now staffed by fewer people than originally intended – with long physical distances between controls, and dedicated displays that aren’t visible from every point in the room. So as staffing standards change, such control rooms become less effective over time

These inconveniences may be tolerable when everything is a running smoothly. But when processes move out of a steady state – when the room needs to be at its peak – they can cause costly and dangerous delays.

Control rooms that work well are specifically designed to promote alertness, reduce stress and fatigue, and be relatively simple to use.

This is done through a range of features, including adjustable consoles and work stations, flexible displays, appropriate lighting, managed acoustics, and attention to the flow of personnel in, out and throughout the room. It’s also done with well integrated systems that allow personnel to quickly access information they need from a minimum number of interfaces – whether it’s service and faultfinding data, operator instructions, trends, device data or anything else.

Control rooms are the important safety net whenever anything goes wrong with an automated process.

Today’s increasingly sophisticated control systems may reduce the amount of work that control rooms need to do. But that’s the very reason why more attention now needs to be given to the way these nerve centers are designed. The moment that a control room needs to be at its peak is never scheduled in advance. But it’s something that can be planned for.

If you want to see friction, put a few process automation salesmen together and ask them whether it’s best for a company to support its legacy control system or to migrate to a new platform.

On the migration side, you’ll hear something like this:

Eventually, your system failures will become increasingly critical and frequent. Or you’ll learn that your original vendor is phasing out support for the system. In either case, it’s time to migrate. As a result, you’ll get faster processing time, and easier integration of diverse components and third-party systems. Migration is expensive, and worth it.

Those who make the case for evolution usually say something like this:

Evolution provides improved control of lifecycle costs and technology budgeting. It minimizes downtime and avoids the major diversion of resources to design, implement, learn, troubleshoot and train on a new system. Evolution preserves operator knowledge, plus all the engineering effort, application work, operations knowledge and programming time that have been invested in a control system over its lifetime. It costs less than migration and delivers more reliable results.

Ironically, most companies hear these opposing views and they come up with a middle-ground plan, best described as Evolutionary Postponement of Migration.

The folks in finance approve of this option, because it minimizes short-term spending. But competitively it makes the least sense of all. It institutionalizes the notion that the existing DCS is just temporary – starving it of the full commitment that a company’s critical operations require. At the same time, it puts off the day when the perceived long-term solution is implemented. It’s the worst of both worlds.

There are really only two strategies that result in a full commitment to peak performance: Evolve Always or Migrate Now. Either one is better than “none of the above.”

Is your company stick in the middle, or has it made a firm commitment to a long-term strategy for its controls?

The notion of a fully integrated operating environment in process industries is like apple pie and Mom: Everybody is for it.

But real-world efforts at integration have given engineers and business leaders reason to view it as a promise that’s too good to be true. Integration of disparate business, production systems and field assets has been so complex that most integration projects have extended only as far as a limited set of fieldbus technologies or loosely connected applications. Functionality and business value are limited; maintenance difficulties and disappointment are not. 

But there are a number of technology applications that now make true integration a possibility. When pulled together into a working platform, the familiar DCS evolves into something that ARC Advisory Group refers to as CPAS: Collaborative Process Automation Systems.

CPAS isn’t a really a category of controls that you can shop for and implement. Not yet, anyway. Rather, it’s what the current crop of process control platforms would be if they were successful at integrating all data and functional silos into a single workflow environment –allowing operators, engineers and managers to work in a single system. And allowing plant assets and field assets to be managed through a single interface – on-site or centrally, and even if the assets were made by dozens of manufacturers and installed at different times. 

In a 2002 report, ARC indicated “that the problems [to achieve this state] were not insurmountable, nor were they technology-constrained. In fact, most of the functionality required had already been developed with much of it commercially available – just not from a single automation supplier.”

Since then, at least some of the major automation suppliers have taken up the challenge to bring these possibilities together in next-generation DCS platforms. Doing so has meant bringing together at least 6 core technologies, (but these would occupy an entire post in and of themselves).

The point is that meaningful integration used to be a fantasy. Today it’s becoming reality.

Do you think it’s still a fantasy, or do you see advances in control systems that make true integration a real possibility?