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Techon has over 26 years experience and is formally trained in Industrial Process Instrumentation and Control Systems, year 1990, registered with the Louisiana State Education System.
Registered online: http://scores.psionline.com National Center For Construction Education and Research
Mechanical Pipeline Technician
DOT Requirement.
Knowledge systems can drive process gains
When the distributed control system, or DCS, came to the market in the 1970s, it was revolutionary technology. With it, the industry achieved substantial gains in operational performance. In the 1990s, the industry upgraded to lower cost open systems and once again boosted profitability at our facilities. Results were tangible and quantifiable. But as DCS technology matured, gains in operational performance reached a plateau. We began looking for the next major breakthrough to push performance and profitability still higher.
In process industries, that breakthrough is a process knowledge system. You may have also heard it referred to more generically as "knowledge management" or a "collaborative manufacturing system." The name does not matter as much as the achievement.
A true process knowledge system does two things that a DCS cannot. First, a process knowledge system captures the knowledge of people in and around a facility and uses that knowledge to take facility performance to higher levels. Second, a process knowledge system is integrated. It not only addresses manufacturing operations but all related operations across the facility.
Like a DCS, a process knowledge system can drive revolutionary gains in performance and profitability for decades to come. Unlike a DCS, the impact will reach far beyond manufacturing and process control. A process knowledge system can make operators more effective, make assets work harder, make our businesses more agile, and push performance throughout the facility to the next level.
If you want an analogy for what a process knowledge system accomplishes, consider what Alan Greenspan does with economic data. The government tracks and collects information on housing starts, money supply, and other financial indicators in the U.S. Greenspan looks at that information and says, "We're heading into a recession; we need to lower interest rates." He is applying his experience in how economic indicators interact and translating the information into knowledge that can drive action. Like Greenspan, a process knowledge system collects and synthesizes data from multiple sources, uses it to comprehend the big picture, and recommends an appropriate actionor provides a means for determining the appropriate action.
This is not magic. The peak profit potential of a facility is a complex, facility-specific set of relationships that group into several disciplines, such as asset health or effectiveness, operator or people effectiveness, physical process performance, and business agility. Optimizing these components individually yields improvements, but the significant gains come from optimizing all of these areas collectively.
The first basic principle of a process knowledge system is that it integrates information sources from across the facility. These include the control system itself, computer maintenance management systems for maintenance, enterprise resource planning for the enterprise and human resources, access control, manufacturing execution systems or facility-wide scheduling optimization, supply chain management, and others. All these systems revolve around the manufacturing process, with DCS at its center. Yet each caters to a particular set of people and optimizesin isolationa small set of the overall operations within the facility.
Attempts to achieve better performance by working from the outside intoward the distributed control systemhave been ineffective. Instead the approach should be outward from the DCSa process knowledge system that extends beyond the traditional borders of a DCS to integrate and address all related operations across an entire facility.
The second basic principle of a process knowledge system is that it uses the knowledge of people inside and outside the facility to drive action. Through this knowledge you can develop models that monitor or mine information from all the available sources, detect or predict events, and notify or even take action directly. In this way, a process knowledge system changes how operators and others work and how they view and interact with process and other facility data. In a process knowledge systemdriven facility, operators have the information they need, when they need it, and in the context of what is happening elsewhere in the facility. They receive, as well, recommended actions and the results those actions effect.
Here is an example of how a process knowledge system can take the guesswork out of executing a brand new production plan:
When a new product comes up, the production plan goes into the facility's process knowledge system. The system notifies schedulers, operators, technicians, and managers involved in production and begins to record actions taken during each step of the production. When the first product comes off the line, a lab technician gets a notification to inspect the product. If the first production run has flaws in the product, the team can look at the record of significant alarms and events that occurred during execution. For example, if equipment is at fault, the manufacturer can identify and then fix it, and the team can run a second production with better results.
Process knowledge systems are the product of advances in a wide range of technologies. On the surface are the familiar information management capabilities stemming from recent advances in computing, communications, and the Internet. But these alone do not create, capture, or embed process knowledge, which is why a process knowledge system cannot effectively work from the outside in. A true process knowledge system marries information management with more profound knowledge-based technologies, including model-based control and optimization, simulation, scheduling, abnormal situation management, wireless and advanced sensing, and advanced applications, and delivers that combination in a form perfectly suited to industry.
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