The Intelligent Enterprise - Components Part 3

The third part on the series on the Need for an Intelligent Enterprise

By Cronin Almeida, Invensys

What makes an enterprise intelligent is that now a days, anything can be instrumented.  Any parameter that plays even a slight role can be measured, documented and made visible. This has enabled real time information to be available across the enterprise. Intelligence and Workflow software along with traditional HMI/Historian software  are the solutions available to help enterprises process and act on this information in real time. The combination of these two products along with an HMI/Historian  enables the stitching of the entire manufacturing ecosystem. Disparate systems like production planning, production execution, quality control can be made to react to specification changes, supply chain availability, environmental regulations and other industry parameters. 

Intelligence enables this through features like Aggregation and Contextualization, where data can be gathered from any in plant or external data source and using an Integrated Development Environment to configure the contextualization of this data and also by creation of Metrics.  It further offers rich analysis capabilities so that the data can be sliced and diced by the user in order to find relationships between various manufacturing data. Intelligence helps transform data into information with an end user perspective.

 

 

Workflow enables real time end to end institutionalization of manufacturing business process across disparate people and systems in an organization. Workflow enables the management of data and knowledge provided by Intelligence across the enterprise by providing standardized approaches to normal, unscheduled or disruptive events in an organizations operation. It enables process agility allowing for dynamic change management for all processes within an organization.  It helps drive higher levels of people-centric and system centric collaboration to enable people, teams, organizations and systems to work together more effectively. 

What differentiates Industry Leaders from the rest?

Implementation Scenarios where Intelligence and Workflow Software are used:

Integrated Refinery information system is used to monitor a large number of operating parameters across and report them is real time.  Intelligence along with Workflow can be used to implement the same.  It is used to monitor a large number of plant operating variables within defined values to maintain the Integrity operating window. In case of violations exceeding the defined period, the concerned stakeholder would be intimated about the type and nature of the violation and an option to rectify the same.   The key parameters are initially defined and envelope values identified for each parameter. The solution will monitor the values in real time, reporting mean and peak values, non-critical alarms, critical alarms and inform action to be taken by the refinery personnel.

 

Workflow Software with Intelligence can be a Major boon for seamless maintenance. Intelligence can detect falling productivity may be due to equipment wear and tear and Workflow software can raise a maintenance request even before the actual failure occurs. During maintenance, the critical information with regard to maintenance procedures can be shared easily with the concerned maintenance crew on their mobile devices using Workflow.

·        Maintaining mass balance is imperative for any process industry both from a regulations and compliance perspective and also from a GMP perspective. Intelligence can detect any mass imbalance from one stage to another or within a stage using advance analysis capabilities. Once detected, a Workflow can be triggered to inform production and maintenance to take appropriate actions which may be modelled on standard operating procedures for a quick and effective solution.  This would result in less down time, improved maintenance reaction time and can avoid any quality issues to arise in the final product along with compliance with environmental regulations. 

·         Chemical feed and control in a water treatment plant for over feed and underfeed control are critical for meeting regulatory compliance and quality control in water and wastewater treatment plants. Since the nature of water treatment is dynamic, there needs to be co-ordination between operations and quality personal.  Intelligence can detect any abnormality like overfeed and underfeed and Workflow can provide closed loop control of chemical treatment by enabling production and quality personal and systems to communicate concurrently ,incorporating human decisions and approvals. 

This concludes the series on Intelligent Enterprise.  Here’s wishing you all Happy Holidays and a fabulous 2014 from all of us at Invensys.