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By focusing on realtime measures, plant operators can improve bottom-line results
Process performance, quality and reliability depend directly on how a plant performs in real time. Yet many plants track and respond only to longterm averages. By measuring and responding to realtime measures, you can ensure:
* Quick recovery from process upsets
* Fast change-over to another product
* Shortened batch-cycle times
Measuring and responding to the right dynamic measures will give you insight into the process, and help you to drive plant improvements.
Plants that use realtime metrics perform substantially better than plants that do not. According to the recently-released "Metrics That Matter" study [1], those who use plant dashboards were 37% more likely than others to improve against operations' key performance indicators (KPIs). These plants were also 53% more likely to improve bottomline business metrics by more than 1%.
Criteria for realtime measures
Many plants tend to focus on statistical averages of performance, such as average cost, percent rejects, or percent uptime. These are excellent measures of process results, but in order to make improvements, we need to focus on realtime measures of performance. To be useful, these measures should meet the following three criteria:
1. Meaningful
2. Measurable
3. Actionable
When a measure is actionable, it helps to lead you directly to a corrective action. The key to making process improvements is to measure the right things, and then to respond with the right corrective actions.
Some of the most common realtime measures that meet this criteria are presented in this article, along with a discussion on how these measures can be made available via a performancesupervision system (PSS). A PSS monitors realtime data, calculates performance metrics, presents the information using plant dashboards, and provides the tools needed to make performance improvements.
How to get realtime data
With the advent of modern distributed control systems (DSCs) and open communications technologies, such as OLE for Process Control (OPC), today's process plant has access to a wealth of realtime information. A realtime PSS can crunch through all the raw data and develop meaningful realtime performance measures, the most important of which are described below.
With a DCS or PLC control system, the process plant is already gathering realtime data from instruments throughout the...