Being able to successfully manage mountains of data is being able to reach the summit of production efficiency. AspenTech’s Robert Golightly explains why.
Collecting and preparing data for analysis consumes 50% of the time and effort. That slow process is a barrier to reducing the severity and duration of process upsets.
The amount of data pouring out of plant operations on a daily basis is a familiar challenge for process manufacturers today. It can be an exhaustive and painstaking environment for engineers and operators having to wade through vast amounts of information generated from various sources and collected across disparate systems.
To conquer data complexity, progressive organisations are standardising on integrated manufacturing execution systems (MES) to reach the pinnacle of best practices in data management. The ability to unearth relevant information, capture, contextualise, visualise and analyse content is crucial to understanding plant behaviour and to make critical operational decisions.
Planning the journey
A belief in business alignment is vital to efficiency. Sophisticated MES analytics tools help drive greater collaboration across the enterprise by enabling benchmarking and sharing of best practices for faster decision-making.
Millions of dollars are lost every year due to production disruptions and unplanned shutdowns. Delivering real-time data intelligence from the plant floor to the boardroom helps to achieve continuous improvement in manufacturing operational excellence. The use of MES leverages innovations that help key stakeholders to make timely decisions that affect plant operational performance and close the gap between plant execution and business plans.
The pinnacle of success for operators is their ability to reliably meet production targets. This requires them to transition capital projects into efficient producing assets and to be able to improve day-to-day asset uptime whilst minimising unplanned downtime.
MES tracks and documents the transformation of raw materials to finished goods and provides information that helps decision-makers understand how current plant conditions can be optimised to improve production output of quality products.
Integrated MES offers powerful capabilities that operate across multiple functional areas, including the management of product definitions across the product life-cycle, resource scheduling, order execution and dispatch, production analysis and downtime management for improvement of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).
Being equipped
MES provides access to real-time plant production data and includes scalable, flexible solutions enabling operators to respond quickly to challenges that may negatively influence efficiency, quality and regulatory compliance.
The data management capabilities within MES puts information at your fingertips, anytime and anywhere, by collecting and organising data across disparate systems and distribute it across the enterprise to make it easy to optimise the value of that data.
The aspenONE MES data foundation, for example, provides a solution to managing the large volumes of real-time and historical data from process control, manufacturing operations, laboratory systems and business systems, which form the foundation for an enterprise-level platform.
Rich calculations, analysis and visualisation tools unlock the data’s value, allowing operators to compare performance across a range of assets and disseminate best practices to processes and sites that require improvement. As a scalable and flexible solution, the data historian software delivers enterprise-wide global deployments across hundreds of locations.
Chemical companies around the globe use these MES tools to make better and faster decisions, driven by a comprehensive view of production operations to maximise asset effectiveness. Adding context to analyses helps identify root causes, such as batch variability, for faster problem resolution and enables operators to take corrective actions to preserve product quality.
Reaching the summit of success
Conquering data management is a crucial task for chemical, petrochemical companies and refineries today.
Industry leaders must not see mastering data management as an unreachable goal, but as an opportunity to improve processes and adopt advanced technology to overcome complexity.
With the right equipment, operators can capture real-time data, monitor plant conditions and respond swiftly to increase productivity, address improvements in product quality and minimise unnecessary downtime costs. With effective MES solutions, plant floor staff and management teams can scrutinise operational behaviour more effectively in line with business plans and reach the peak of operational excellence.
To find out more about AspenTech’s aspenONE Manufacturing Execution Software solution, click here.
