Industrial organizations across the globe are striving to keep their workers and communities safe and healthy and also contending with the full range of effects — to the economy, to their supply chains and their operations — of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads, plant owners/operators are looking for ways to change how they work. This includes refineries, chemical plants and manufacturing facilities. These changes must happen as quickly as possible.
In addition to ensuring safe, reliable, efficient, sustainable and profitable facilities, plant operating companies must contemplate new ways to run their sites. With the loss of human assets due to the pandemic crisis — not to mention the experienced workforce retiring — it has become clear the operating model of having everyone on-site needs to change.
1. Benefit from digitization
Digital effectiveness is key to staying ahead in today’s manufacturing environment. An emphasis on digital asset and process management will enable plant operating companies to achieve new levels of efficiency, productivity and safety.
Currently, many plant operators have to extract insights from separate siloed software applications, and then use additional analytics tools and experience to draw insights and develop actions. This analysis is often very process- or asset-specific and often does not include the economic trade-offs resulting in sub-optimal actions.
Combining the latest technologies can help assure business continuity and improve performance. These include sensors, connectivity, data capture, visualization and advanced analytics. It also covers activities such as remote monitoring and operations, condition-based and predictive maintenance and real-time operator intelligence.
The transition to remote plant operations is being made easier through the implementation of proven and secure digital tools. Remote monitoring and operations software can now be deployed and utilized in a way that is cybersecure with no increased risk to plant operations.
2. Evaluate remote operations strategy
To help industrial organizations meet their business objectives, leading automation suppliers have developed innovative remote operations solutions, which provide the expertise, skills and technology capabilities customers need to operate in a difficult business climate.
A remote operations strategy plays a crucial role in running complex manufacturing plants and relies on a modern automation infrastructure. Using data gathered in the from process or assets, plant personnel can manage daily production, maintenance and safety and make improvements across multiple sites. They can operate the plant, track production targets, monitor asset health, and even create scenarios to determine the effect of operational changes prior to implementation.
The establishment of a remote capability also helps in supporting installed automation systems, networks and devices, and can assist with development, deployment and testing, training and technology migration.
3. Use tools for safety, digital systems, monitoring
There are many important reasons to adopt a remote operations and support strategy during these challenging times. To keep workers safe and comply with social distancing guidelines, for example, the number of onsite employees needs to be reduced. This will help protect workers who are onsite and keep operations running. It’s important to support them with advanced safety equipment and use tools such as digital video systems for the facility’s security as well as monitoring access control systems, so it’s clear who is on site at all times.
The latest digitized workforce management solutions leverage real-time data and digitization to improve the productivity, safety and compliance of employees, contractors and visitors. These provide real-time enforcement and monitoring capabilities and integrate with access control and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to streamline a host of workforce management activities.
Original content can be found at Control Engineering.
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