Turning data into good decision-making
Process Technology Trends: Viewpoint from Anand Vishnubhotla, who leads the global center of excellence for intuition executive at Honeywell / Honeywell Process Solutions:
A key trend we are seeing this year is around making sense of all the data in a plant and across the enterprise, which is now a constant struggle for many operations.
At manufacturing facilities, critical information is often scattered throughout a variety of databases, enterprise applications and operational systems in a wide range of formats. If this information does not come together in a meaningful way, the opportunity for plant and business personnel to collaborate and then take effective action is lost.
Industrial organizations, therefore, require better ways to deal with the mountain of disparate data collected in plants or across facilities. Multiple applications and spreadsheets typically are used to manage production, monitor processes and make operating decisions. These systems are usually isolated or linked with complex, custom interfaces that make it difficult to use the data and maintain its integrity.
The latest data-integration and visualisation technologies, however, enable users to anticipate, collaborate and act with confidence on data. That’s why developers of operational intelligence solutions now focus on providing context to information, which starts with a unified view of data assets enabling capture of valuable knowledge across the enterprise and sharing of key learnings and best practices.
Solutions supporting continuous performance monitoring can be used to trigger notifications and tasks or workflows, with sophisticated dashboards and dynamic handling of problems and opportunities in near real time.
Data is harnessed and delivered across the enterprise so personnel can collaborate between business units and take the right actions when needed. In addition, companies can replace rapidly out-of-date print documentation and capture the knowledge of experts prior to retirement or staff attrition.
In a typical process plant, operations-intelligence solutions simplify reporting and eliminate errors by automating data entry for business analytics and process safety. They also serve as the main interface for controlroom operators to observe processes and dialog.
Since data is correlated, aggregated and presented in a uniform manner, plants achieve real-time visibility and systematic capture of know-how of their workforce. This saves time and allows employees to concentrate on their core activities or consider process improvements.
With today’s advanced technology, companies can make more agile decisions, drive intelligent operations and solve key challenges. Operations management can progress from data to decisions faster with visual key report analysis and diagnostic data, and then act on knowledge in a systematic manner.
This also helps plants to stop reinventing and start reusing assets and procedures in order to squeeze more value out of current investments.
The latest technologies and software provide the means to streamline workflows across the plant, improve personnel productivity, and reduce interface cost and complexity. Capturing expert knowledge in a repeatable set of actions facilitates collaboration across functional silos and geographic boundaries, and can enable staff reductions in remote locations.
Organisations with access to the right information at the right time are able to identify opportunities for optimisation and avoid problems that previously passed unnoticed. Plus, they transition from locating and analyzing information to taking action on it more quickly.
The ability to see, understand and act on the relationships within critical data is key to creating a competitive advantage, and this can only be achieved when all applications and underlying data are amalgamated.
Once industrial organisations do this, they can identify and take advantage of opportunities earlier, mitigate potentially damaging plant events and make confident business decisions.