The Road to Better Analytics Is Paved with Integrated Solutions

Summary

In recent years, the bar for running an efficient, reliable plant has gotten increasingly higher. Around the globe, demand for new products is increasing rapidly, while new competition seems to spring up around every corner. To stay competitive, and to help operations continually meet customer needs, reliability teams must ensure assets run at peak performance 24x7.

In addition to the need for continuous, reliable operation, the world has also rapidly increased its focus on sustainability. Across the globe, consumers and legislators are calling for increasing regulation of operations to curb emissions, reduce energy use, and eliminate environmental incidents. This new focus puts increasing pressure on reliability teams to improve their performance.

Accomplishing such an improvement requires data, which most plants do not struggle to generate. However, the data reliability teams need is usually trapped. Few plants still have deep benches of personnel available to manually collect critical data—especially for balance-of-plant assets—from its various silos. Moreover, even if reliability personnel can collect the data, they rarely have the expert analysts onsite to make sense of it.

Automated data analytics solutions can help, but to be effective, they must be implemented strategically. To accomplish strategic implementation, many of today’s most effective reliability teams are pursuing a boundless automation vision of seamless data mobility from the intelligent field, through the edge, and into the cloud—preparing not only for better use of data today, but also for any changes and additions they may make in the future.

Ultimately, organizations of any size can embrace data analytics to pursue more reliable, sustainable operations. Doing so with a boundless automation vision in mind will help reliability teams better lock in and increase the value of their solutions at every stage, now and in the future.
 

Making data mobile

Readying data for effective analysis means moving away from manual collection. Effective data analysis requires reliable and regular data collection, and few teams still have the number of personnel it takes to maintain the required cadence manually. Instead, today’s most effective teams are turning to seamlessly integrated continuous monitoring solutions. Continuous data collection helps teams ensure all data is collected in real-time, regardless of who is on staff, or how difficult an asset may be to access.

The first step is to implement small but powerful wireless vibration monitors. The most effective monitors are affordable and can be installed nearly anywhere by a plant’s own personnel. Using embedded, prescriptive analytics, the best wireless vibration monitors deliver fast, accurate diagnostic information.

In addition, many forward-thinking reliability teams are installing edge analytics devices. Edge analytics solutions collect vibration and process data, and then apply embedded auto-analytics to alert personnel to the most common faults in a wide range of rotating assets including fans, motors, gearboxes and pumps. Edge devices process data right at the source and deliver actionable information—understandable by technicians of any experience level—right into the hands of key personnel via intuitive dashboards. With or without data analysts on site, reliability teams taking advantage of modern sensing and edge technologies can see up-to-the-moment condition information for assets and processes, and they can gain easy access to solutions for identified problems.
 

Software improves success

Part of following a boundless automation vision is bringing contextualized data together for seamless visibility, access by cross-functional teams, and distribution to key personnel. Implementing integrated industrial software gives data analysts the visibility they need into the health of a wider array of devices and assets across the network, from a wider range of tools.

Device manager software improves connectivity with real-time online access to intelligent instrument and valve diagnostics and alerts. The most advanced solutions use open standards and protocols to provide personnel with the ability to connect to thousands of devices across the plant and enterprise, with access through the control system. With control system-level access, teams can ensure the data they collect is not only available, but also contains critical contextualization from the process to unlock deeper analytics capabilities.

Today’s teams are also taking advantage of machinery health software solutions that combine predictive maintenance technology with built-in analytics tools for easy assessment of machinery health. Using a machinery health software solution, reliability and maintenance personnel can instantly view a simple health score for their machinery, reducing the need for analysts to spend time studying spectrum and waveform data. The most advanced applications can bring all the company’s assets together into a single dashboard for more visibility and easier scheduling. In addition, similarly to edge analytics devices, machinery health software provides built-in analytics to automatically identify the most common problems in rotating machinery, eliminating the need for analysts to diagnose common issues, and freeing them for higher value tasks.

Comprehensive, enterprise-wide analytics

A true boundless automation vision incorporates device and machinery asset management data with historical and real-time industrial process data, bringing analytics capability to the next level: a comprehensive, enterprise-wide analytics engine available through a single platform.

At the heart of effective enterprise analytics solutions is powerful agent-based analytics software. Whether trained from data associated with known equipment failures, designed using first-principles, or collected from built-in machine templates, agents perform complex machine learning and data science work behind the scenes, to not only identify real-time anomalous behavior, but to also predict equipment degradation, alerting key personnel weeks in advance of potential events (Figure 1).

Design and implement with purpose

There is no one-size-fits-all configuration to deliver the perfect data analytics solution across every organization’s enterprise. However, purposeful implementation driven by the vision to seamlessly connect systems via native integration for better data mobility from the field, through the edge, and into the cloud will help teams build solutions that are more resilient, more effective, and easier to maintain across the lifecycle. Whether a company still has a deep bench of expert analysts, or is struggling to find any, automation solutions are available to improve performance and close gaps. When implemented strategically, they can deliver continued value, even as operations, regulations, and personnel continue to change.
 
_{All figures courtesy of Emerson}