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Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 - 10:52 am EST

Q&A with Craig Resnick of ARC Advisory Group

Posted by: Michelle Liro

Next week Craig Resnick, research director and automation expert at ARC Advisory Group will be the guest speaker for our webinar "Best Practices for Preventing Downtime in Automation Systems."  We recently sat down with Craig to discuss some of the recent trends in the manufacturing and automation industries.

Q: What are some of the newer trends that you are seeing in the automation space?

Craig Resnick: A primary trend that we see at ARC is the convergence of automation and IT systems. Nearly every manufacturing company uses a variety of plant automation and enterprise IT systems to manage its operations. Plant floor systems, such as distributed control systems (DCS), programmable automation and logic controllers (PACs/PLCs), and a wide range of plant floor applications provide a wealth of real-time information regarding productivity, efficiency, equipment health, capability, and quality. Business systems, in turn, provide information on raw material costs, product orders and inventories, manufacturing resources, production schedules, etc. This wide range of information often remains isolated in systems such as manufacturing execution systems (MES), laboratory systems, maintenance systems, scheduling systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, supply chain management (SCM) systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Decisions based on data from any one of these system will always be less than optimal because, without the corresponding information from the other systems, the information will be incomplete.

To close this gap between automation and IT systems, and to address the trend of the plant floor becoming more IT-centric, ARC has defined a new space, defined as Collaborative Production Systems. These new systems consist of platforms in which the controls layer domains of process, logic, motion, building automation, and power control systems converge with the information layer domains of production management and MES systems. These converged systems enable, for example, the required data and information to be directly tied into applications such as corporate reporting and manufacturing compliance. Collaborative Production Systems will become the industrial blade server that provides full monitoring and control of the enterprise, from the office to the plant floor, sharing that information with the supply chain to, for example, procure materials and resources and purchase or sell power at the optimal times and prices from the smart grid, while providing full financial metrics and KPIs to ERP systems to maximize profitability.


Q: Now that corporate reporting and systems are heavily tied into the “factory floor”, how is that changing the need for system availability and data protection?

Craig Resnick: The need for system availability and data protection continues to expand, driven by a combination of issues ranging from global competition to regulatory requirements. Process safety and critical control are primarily focused on system availability and process uptime. As a specific example, take the Pharmaceutical industry, where data and batch information can never be lost or interrupted. System availability and data protection needs are also forcing E-records regulations to evolve across the globe. In the US, this includes 21 CFR Part 11, as well as the FDA’s Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and Process Analytical Technology (PAT) initiatives. In Europe, this includes Annex 11 of the EU GMPs, electronic Signatures Directive 1999/93/EC, and Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC. The European Data Protection Directive requires even more protection on data than the current FDA regulations and extends this requirement to clinical trials patients, as all clinical trials data requires maximum protection to remain compliant with regulations.

Unscheduled downtime is expensive. It often impacts production’s ability to meet its schedule and may cause missed customer commitments. Unplanned downtime, which also includes unexpected stoppages resulting from equipment failure, operator error, or nuisance trips, is the nemesis of all manufacturers. Statistics on the impact of unplanned downtime on plant operations show that it accounts for 2 to 5 percent of production lost in, for example, the petrochemical industry. Unscheduled downtime is also costly in terms of equipment damage, environmental harm, and worker safety. The cost of downtime is reflected in a primary key performance indicator (KPI) used by manufacturers known as Dynamic Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), which helps determine the real-time impact of the performance of any individual process or piece of equipment on the overall efficiency of the plant. Unscheduled downtime is a primary factor that significantly lowers Dynamic OEE, which translates to the manufacturer decreasing both its efficiency and profitability.

Q: What are some of the basic steps that companies can implement to ensure the availability of their systems?

Craig Resnick: The first step that companies can implement to ensure the availability of their systems is to maximize their operator’s effectiveness in the control room, which is essential to minimize the risks of accidents, eliminate unscheduled downtime, and maximize production quality. The global process industry loses $20 billion, or five percent of annual production, due to unscheduled downtime and poor quality. ARC estimates that almost 80 percent of these losses are preventable and 40 percent of those preventable losses are primarily the result of human or operator error. Maximizing operator effectiveness requires automating as many functions as technology will allow, as well as reducing complexity wherever possible. For example there are still many plants where operators monitor the processes and collect data manually or semi-automatically using chart recorders. This process is both tedious and error prone, and does not provide appropriate process insight or instill a sense of ownership among the control room operators.

The Abnormal Situation Management Consortium (ASM) points out that most incidences occur from multiple modes of failure. Preventable human error is a contributing factor to these losses, but is hardly the only cause. Preventing abnormal situations requires a multilayered multi-discipline approach focused on maximizing production throughput, efficiency and quality while minimizing lost production time and preventing damage to assets and endangerment to personnel. This approach requires deploying collaborative production systems designed and implemented to be able to deliver high levels of availability and fault-tolerance expected from any other mission critical industrial system. This typically requires effective data backup mechanisms, redundant controllers for critical applications, plus industrial grade software. Manufacturers are also deploying more fault tolerant server technology to ensure continuous availability of these mission critical applications; the continuous flow of vital products to the market; and the avoidance of the potentially negative financial, social, or environmental impact that operating without high availability fault-tolerant systems might bring.

 

To learn more about preventing downtime in your automation applications, be sure to attend next week's webinar where Craig will provide expert info on steps for reducing the human error that leads to downtime, how to protect your hardware, storage and networks for complete availability coverage, and how to protect against a complete site failure. You can register here.
 

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Manufacturing  Downtime  Fault Tolerance  High Availability  Interview  Webcast  Webinar 

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