Control And Automation Systems For Facilities
In smaller facilities, up to a handful of people might be in charge of the process control system. Larger companies may be made up of multiple facilities, requiring specific system integration needs for optimal business operation.
As companies grow—or seek to become wholly connected enterprises—system integrations can become costly. Determining the right level of integration for a company is key to maintaining an ideal cost to value ratio when planning integration initiatives.
Today's manufacturing landscape consists of many types of organizations: from smaller companies with a single facility to co-manufacturing facilities producing goods for a wide variety of customers, to a worldwide enterprise with dozens of facilities. All these companies have one thing in common: they need to get information from the plant floor to the decision makers. Whether that means understanding production capacity before taking on a new customer or prioritizing production to stay agile in an ever-changing consumer landscape, the overall concepts of system integration remain the same.
Information Integration
Integration between business systems and process control systems can be a powerful tool for a manufacturing company.
Regardless of the company’s size, data begins the transformation into information at the process level:
Real-time data is stored in process historians
Quality control data is integrated for statistical process control
Energy metrics are calculated and integrated with billing
Production scheduling interfaces with warehousing and operations to prioritize what gets made and when
A larger company with a corporate level system will integrate plant-level data into its systems to give corporate staff the information they need to make decisions.
Solutions at Every Scale
While the scale of integrated systems will vary widely between a regional manufacturing company and a worldwide one, the concepts remain the same across the board. A global company with facilities on multiple continents can be thought of as a collection of smaller plants. Each facility has its own systems, process historians, shipping and receiving, quality control, and customer service systems just like any other single facility. The difference is that each plant becomes a source of information that is fed into corporate level systems. This is no different than the system architecture at the single plant level; it has one or more additional layers of integration.
In the same way that the amount of information is pruned as it goes up the organizational chart, corporate-level staff typically won’t need to see finely detailed information about each plant to do their jobs. Their key performance indicators (KPIs) will be based on data at the plant level rather than the equipment level. They may never need to drill down into a plant to see specific information on a piece of equipment, although the option can be presented if necessary. The flow of information is just as important at any size company. Defining how data is turned into information is a key point to discuss with your system integrators and staff who will be creating the requirements and specifications for implementing the project.
The Cost of Industry 4.0 and Beyond
The key to effective integrated systems is understanding the costs and benefits of investing in integration. One way to keep costs manageable is to simplify the amount of data sent up the organizational chart. As an extreme example, sending all the real-time plant data from each PLC to the CEO's desk would require a lot of unnecessary effort and wouldn’t provide much—if any—value to the CEO. Instead, this data should be converted into information in the form of KPIs and reports as it moves up the chain of command. At the corporate level, the KPIs and reports will require less raw data and will look very different than what a plant manager needs. The best way to understand the cost versus value of any integration is to sit down with the person who will be using the new information and find out what they need from the system to perform their job. This is a much better approach than to build a sustem based on assumptions—then having to remove unnecessary data that’s cluttering the workflow. In most cases, the information someone will request will take much less work to generate.
Reducing Integration Complexity
As companies grow and more systems are integrated, the overall complexity will grow. By spending the time and resources up front, this complexity can be reduced by giving people only the information they need at first and growing the system with them as they become more familiar with its capabilities. The best approach is to start small and grow rather than give someone a system with an overwhelming amount of data up front. Overwhelmed people resists changes, no matter the benefits a new system may provide.
Key Concepts:
Determine the right integration level is key for companies looking to maintain an ideal cost to value ratio when planning integration initiatives.
Defining how data becomes information is an important discussion to have with system integrators and staff.
Spending time and resources up front can reduce any potential confusion that system integrators and users might have at first.
Considering Costs and Complexity…
What other methods can be used to reduce costs and system complexity? Read our Case Study on Jaxon Energy—which is the basis of this post—for more insights. For more information on the Services that Corso provides, please contact us to talk about your specific project. Alex Marcy wrote this originally for Oil & Gas Engineering
Updated 8/8/2022