Control Station launched Sept. 24 its System Health Monitoring (SHM) service that uses intelligence captured by its PlantESP loop performance monitoring software. The service enables proactive monitoring of PlantESP deployments, facilitating rapid response to system resource issues and guidance for achieving control. Dozens of PlantESP licensees and the associated production facilities reportedly enrolled in the service before the official launch.
PlantESP uses a facility’s historical process data to assess PID controller performance on a plant- or enterprise-wide basis. The software uncovers a range of common, mechanical, tuning and process interaction issues that undermine productivity and contribute to unplanned downtime. PlantESP’s library of metrics automates identification of controller-related performance issues, and its portfolio of advanced forensic tools simplifies isolation of root-causes.
Historically, monitoring systems like PlantESP could falter due to natural disasters and other unexpected events, and process manufacturers lacked a common method for assessing performance. SHM assures that deployments operate effectively, while also providing a benchmark of performance, and improving production.
“More than verifying a system’s health and providing a prioritized list of tasks, SHM benchmarks a plant’s overall effectiveness from a regulatory control perspective,” says Jonathan Stevens, services director at Control Station. “These insights let users see how their plant stacks up against others, and provides a simple way for licensees to measure the positive impact of each change on their plant’s operations.”
Intelligence derived by PlantESP is transmitted daily via a compact and encrypted machine-readable file. The captured information equips Control Station with timely awareness of:
- Server health and basic evaluations of the system, including verification of server’s status (i.e., on/off), calculation engine status and access to required databases.
- Infrastructure analysis, and assessing system functionality and architecture, including available server and database hard-drive space, identifying misconfigured and/or invalid loops and tags, and documenting “dead loops.”
- Control benchmarking that’s valuable for assessing a plant’s regulatory control performance, and indicating net changes in performance over time.
SHM uses combines metrics and other intelligence to calculate Control Station’s Overall Controller Effectiveness (OCE) value, which is a normalized measure Control Station developed for control-loop operations based on the methodology for calculating overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). OCE provides a simple, quantitative way to benchmark control levels in a plant. By receiving periodic scorecards, SHM subscribers can establish plant or even corporate performance standards. Within the tiered service, a list of priority recommendations can be provided that aid users by targeting PID-related issues that offer the most impact on control and production performance.
“The impact that process engineering and operations teams have on control and plant performance can be hard to measure,” noted Dr, Bob Rice, engineering VP at Control Station. “Our SHM service equips those teams with a simple gauge for evaluating their performance. With OCE, they can track progress, and gain perspective on their plant’s positioning relative to the broader manufacturing landscape.”
