Plant Management
n A purge rate needs to be temporarily increased to remove impurities from a column. Monitoring the purge rate and the yield helps ensure the purge valve will be reset at the right time, which will prevent an undesirable loss of production.
Monitoring solutions Plant operations departments are re-thinking their approach to operational excellence in order to realise the maximum benefit from ongoing technology developments. Instead of simply managing the effects of operating outside established boundaries, they are seeking to expose the operating envelope to all appropriate plant stakeholders and ensure it is well understood across operations and related organisations. Technology providers have historically offered operations monitoring applications as part of an overall operations management portfolio. Too often, however, this technology required users to accommodate a large hardware footprint, complex and costly server infrastructure and licensing, and extensive programming effort. This situation drove up the cost of operations monitoring programmes and forced plant engineers to rely on less complicated ‘homegrown’ monitoring techniques.
Alternative to spreadsheets The current breed of operations monitoring solutions helps organisations transition from labour-intensive, legacy plant performance spreadsheets to an automated and standardised system for facility-wide data collection, analysis and reporting. This allows the enterprise to move beyond disjointed spreadsheets and difficult scripting languages, non- standard and inefficient processes, and inconsistent calculations requiring significant manual input. New software tools are intended to
systematically monitor process plant performance data and summarise deviations from the operating plan. These tools are well suited for tracking operating performance against targets and highlighting problem areas. They
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are designed to fit into existing work processes and help operations teams institutionalise those procedures.
Plant data sources Today’s operations monitoring infrastructure may reside at level 3 or 4 of the plant network hierarchy, utilising industry-standard OPC data access to establish connections for retrieving real- time data from historians and various other data sources. Monitoring solutions employing browser-based displays can provide plant-wide access to monitoring results (Fig. 1).
End-user benefits Operations monitoring to enable better decision-making is a growing necessity based on current plant operational demands. Even experienced operators may not know the best operating range for throughput or may fail to realise the consequences of operating outside of targets. Furthermore, operations monitoring helps industrial facilities move to the next level of operational excellence by leveraging the benefits of alarm management initiatives. Operations monitoring benefits come from a variety of sources, including:
n Reduced number and severity of incidents; n Reduced operating and maintenance costs through increased asset reliability; n Better safety and environmental compliance; n Increased operating margins through better fidelity to the operating plan.
An effective operations monitoring solution delivers these benefits by supporting a structured, systematic monitoring programme.
Conclusion Improving operational performance and reliability requires a team effort by operators, engineers and various other specialists within the plant. These people will benefit from operations monitoring solutions that build on alarm management efforts and improve their ability to monitor the performance of processes and operating assets. n
A typical
process plant might use an operations
monitoring tool as follows:
n Engineers, head operators and other staff meet every few weeks or months to review reports and comments entered by operators when considering updates to safe operating limits throughout the plant.
n Process data is monitored every few minutes. Any deviations outside operating limits are recorded.
n Operators enter comments about important deviations by the end of the shift.
n Monthly stewardship reports provide information such as the total number of deviations, the top 10 tags in each unit with the most problems, and the top reasons why deviations occurred.
Chris Stearns is with Honeywell Process Solutions.
www.honeywellprocess.com
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