Want to extract the most out of your control system?

Process and manufacturing industries are moving towards 'automated' information to keep track of their systems and social media-enabled technology

Nowadays our lives have become more and more digital, our work collaboration more virtual, and everything you could ever want to know is just a click away. This isn’t only changing in our day-to-day lives. Process and manufacturing industries are moving towards ‘automated’ information to keep track of their systems and social media-enabled technology, which is playing an increasingly important role in industrial plants. Web-based, social media-enabled platforms can make it easier for industrial end users to manage their automation assets and access critical information and reports.

Process plant operators are facing various operating challenges: these include the need to manage increased system complexity, handling a constant stream of updates fast and efficiently, in addition to minimizing downtime and making optimum use of staff and resources.

In huge plant, sometimes dozens of employees work on several control systems and handle processes with many thousands of I/O points like oil refineries, pipelines, copper mines or chemical production sites, to name only a few.

And if this wasn’t enough of a challenge: a control system itself is very complex. To operate the process control system, there is quite some administrative, non-trivial work for the plant manager to do. You need to keep your licenses up-to-date, plan trainings for your operators, install software patches and virus protection software and also look at the overall performance of the system. The plant manager is often required to look in a variety of places to obtain an overview of all these things.

In order to be able to either identify problems quickly to prevent a situation deteriorating and to discover ways of making their plant run more efficiently, plant managers need a control system that provides its users with a simple and convenient means of keeping track of information related to their systems, software, safety reports, training status, and contact information.

Total support costs and unnecessary after-hours phone support or service calls can be reduced by giving the plant manager access to pre-filtered, real-time information via a control system dashboard. The access to answers to frequently asked questions reduces the time and effort spent looking for information. Users will also be able to quickly download documentation and software updates relating to their control system, view online training videos, run system benchmark reports and access all relevant safety reports, alerts or product documents.

The health status of the control system can be checked with benchmark reports, which indicate optimization possibilities. In addition, fingerprint reports  can  show the status of the control system’s return on  investment (ROI) key  performance indicators (KPIs) and suggest what the plant operator should do to bridge any performance gap.

To find out more about My Control System read the full article in the ABB Review