You want to get more out of your industrial control system?
COLLECT
- Reliably add new measurements?
- Automate or digitalize a manual process?
- Expand your installation with more sensors?
CONNECT
- Link different programs or datasources together?
- Make logical connections between business processes to gain more insight?
ANALYZE
- Need help in converting data into information?
- Get your site specific key performance indicators extracted from abundant data sources?
VISUALIZE
- Want to quickly view the status of your production enviroment?
- Want access to your information, anytime, anywhere?
COLLECT
Data is everywhere, either readily available or possible to create or extract. In the world of IoT, this is a common practice. However, this is not that common in the industrial world. In the field, but also on the L2/L3 systems, data is waiting to be collected. Think of extra process data via temporary/wireless sensors, extra asset and management data embedded in smart devices or extra system and network data.
To be able to process collected data, it needs to be stored in a way it can be easily processed by supervisory systems. As collecting data is mostly a customized digital or manual process because of the different (types of) sources, storing should happen in a generic way. This way of adding new sources should prevent the need to make extra adjustment to the processing infrastructure. Carefully parsing, formatting and storing the data is a necessity to be able to expand and scale the smart plant data infrastructure with the least effort.
CONNECT
If you are looking for knowledge and experience to collect the data and store it for further processing, we can help. Through years of experience Intation has acquired the knowledge to extract asset, network, system and/or process data. The means to extract data can vary from adding extra sensors to the process, writing API’s and drivers for data extraction or simply pickup and parse the necessary log and configuration files available on the different systems.
Whenever information needs to be communicated to other systems, like ERP or maintenance systems, Intation can implement the necessary API’s and communication protocols to provide the infrastructure for seamless integration into your existing plant information systems. A good example would be the combination of localization technologies with your alarm systems.
ANALYZE
When collecting and storing data, the biggest question is simply: what do you want to do with this massive amount of data? What is the goal, what is the information you want to extract from the data that adds value? These questions touch the core of the smart plant philosophy and can have many fields of interest, like cybersecurity, production improvement or business process optimization and automation to name a few. There is no straight answer and it heavily depends on your industry, current situtation and needs of the business interests.
Intation can assist in setting up and defining the goals, design and implement the needed analysis tools and algorithms in order to achieve these goals. With operational excellence and Six Sigma ready tools we can determine how to get the correct KPI’s that tell you what is really going on. InOperation is a service that we can offer to implement a good alarm management philosophy and implementation.
VISUALIZE
When the analysis of the data is in place and starts producing results, these results need to be, as they call it, human-readable. Presentation of the needed information to the stakeholders can take many forms, like reporting or dashboarding. Depending on the stakeholder, the information can be visualized differently. For example to operations, safety, cyberdefence or management.
In today’s situation, an operator or technician asks for information based on a search query. Through modern interfaces, there are a lot of possibilities. Interfacing through smartphones, tablets and augmented reality applications like Microsoft Hololens and Google Glass provide a lot of oppertunities to improve your operations and efficiency.
