As today’s lean process manufacturing teams look for ways to make the most of their limited resources, many are trying to find a way to limit the impact of having their most expert people spread thin across plants that may be many miles—or even continents—apart. Often national and global operations can result in variability in operational performance between plants, even if they are configured identically.
As Sean Saul points out in his recent article in Control Engineering magazine, this variability can make it challenging to operate a company at peak efficiency.
“It is common for multiple plants across a fleet to have staff with a wide spectrum of experience and expertise, and that can lead to significant variability in operational performance, even across plants that are otherwise nearly identical. If every plant in the fleet operates differently than all the others, it can be difficult to optimize operations, and, by extension, challenging to achieve operational excellence.”
Typically, management teams can help navigate this variability by driving uniformity across plants via centralized monitoring and analytics. However, accomplishing that feat requires a boundless automation vision for seamless data mobility from the intelligent field, through the edge, and into the cloud. Only with quality, contextualized data can centralized monitoring be reliable. Fortunately, however, modern enterprise tools and software-as-a-service solutions can help teams accomplish these goals.
Why is data mobility complex
Over decades, many organizations have built up a wide array of disparate technologies in their plants. In many cases, operational technology (OT) teams purchase what is convenient or cost effective in the moment, and that solution may not be the same as everything else in the plant, or in other plants across the fleet. When it comes time to move the data into a central location, those same teams often find that they don’t have easy solutions to do so. Either the systems aren’t designed to interact seamlessly, or, engineering was designed specifically to air gap control technologies without a plan for moving the data to analytics solutions. Either way, the data gets trapped in silos and is inaccessible to enterprise teams.
From the edge to the enterprise
Modern technologies are helping teams break down these silos. First, edge solutions like the DeltaV™ Edge Environment helps securely and seamlessly move data from the control layer up to enterprise applications. Sean explains,
“Modern edge environments eliminate the need for complex custom engineering, allowing control system data to escape the layers of automation infrastructure. Secure, unidirectional communication transmits control system data—with all its associated context intact—directly to management and analytics applications at the edge, without any risk of external access to the control system.”
Improved efficiency across the lifecycle
The edge is just the beginning. Today’s most efficient OT teams are also driving improved operations with centralized lifecycle management solutions like Emerson’s Guardian™ Digital Experience. A performance management platform like Guardian can help organizations manage their software across an entire fleet to ensure everything is standardized, up-to-date, and rolled out correctly. Sean explains,
“Teams can identify their security posture, manage risk, and enhance decision making surrounding software releases and evolving standards. Managing everything from one place dramatically reduces the number of expert personnel who must travel between locations to collect and compare data, freeing them to perform the work necessary to bring systems up to date.”
With a better view “from the top” organizations can more easily identify the causes of performance bottlenecks, track and trend production, and better align high-level business strategies to deliver operational excellence. In today’s ever-changing marketplace, that kind of visibility is worth its weight in gold, helping lean teams do more with less while still supporting business goals to capture and maintain competitive advantage.
