for the Process Industry
Top
levels of performance require the use of extensive information...
For
enterprises that have the knowledge to recognise changes taking
place in the areas of competition, regulations and the market –
and which are flexible enough to meet the challenges– opportunities
for profit are there.
Large industrial complexes, such as refineries, generate massiveamounts
of data.
Much of it is in real time, changing rapidly with conditions and
events. Other data is more static, such as transactional, structural,
relational, textual and objective data.
The aggregation of this real time and static data provides a continuous
information flow describing the operational and business performance
of the enterprise.
Top levels of performance require the use of extensive external
information, which is now more often in real time, to ensure that
adjustments to the operation can be made so as to achieve maximum
commercial performance of the industrial assets.
This external information includes commercial, demographic, weather,
regulatory, mechanical and technical information.
In many of today’s shareholder-value-driven corporations, senior
management no longer focuses on the tactical business and operation.
Shareholders expect them to develop a winning vision and for the
leadership team to execute it with dramatic results and no surprises.
Everyone must perform to implement the businessand operating parameters
to achieve the evolving vision.
An infrastructure to continuously measure performance against the
vision is therefore critical to executive and enterprise survival.
Without the ability to continuously measure performance gains against
the gains set in terms of expected shareholder value, management
is likely to fall.
A refinery in the USA is making use of new information technology
in innovative ways to bring the most resources available to meet
the current business challenges.
The refinery is now able to expose live, real time data and events
for users via the desktop, internet browser and via products such
as web-enabled palmtops and
telephones.Information is presented based on real-time data and
events arising at the lowest equipment level, as well as data and
events arising frombusiness systems and from the global web driven
market place.
The events alert the user, from plant technicians to corporate executives
to third party experts for the need to take decisions, and provide
the information by which to make the best decisions.
Figure
1 illustrates a typical current infrastructure for the development
of data from a modern refinery.
These are good systems but the underlying packages were built for
departmental staff and usually for a particular purpose – operations,
health and safety, yield accounting, process engineering, maintenance
or laboratory.
They do not deploy the information needed to all staff in a common
environment that would allow collaboration in a common environment
that would allow collaboration on common objectives.
Figure
2 illustrates the same modern refinery with an improved infrastructure
that allows deployment of data from the refinery to third parties
and from external third party sources back into the refinery, all
within the same web-enabled infrastructure.
The refiner can now continue to easily expand the resources available
to this new infrastructure and secure the greatestvalue at the least
cost from the external marketplace.
As illustrated in Figure 2, the following changes are required to
get the current capability to acquire and validate needed management
information and deploy it in real time:
l Upgrade existing systems l Install application hosting processor
l Configure and install data reconciliation l Configure and install
models l Add remote engineering monitors l Support additional new
applications l Add management information systems, wireless and
web access, enterprise monitoring and management decision support
applications.
All of this information is now available to all individuals in the
enterprise through their browsers and the web. Plant data that changes
continuously, is associated with the fixed asset data of the plant
that remains..
