A Quantitative Comparison of Digitized Industrial Automation Systems
●Changing the way industrial automation systems are engineered, operated,and maintained is critical to bringing new sources of tangible business value to plant owners and the EPCs, OEMs, and systems integrators who support them. Traditional design and implementation approaches suffer from gross inefficiencies due to overly engineered, tailored,and closed designs,or very narrowly defined “engineered once/deployed once”methodologies. These challenges have only been masked with an array of band-aid tools instead of genuine solutions. As a result, many industrial automation engineering projects are saddled with human error, scheduling delays,and cost overruns.
Rigid applications require highly skilled engineers with specific experience in a particular proprietary system to perform the configuration and integration work. Due to this outdated engineering approach, plant stakeholders are unable to recognize major shifts, to make the necessary adjustments, and to realize additional total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits.
The solution lies in anopen engineering philosophy and strategy that centers around user experience. By placing the user at the center of the engineering universe, plants attain the operational phase in a shorter time period, with lower costs and fewer risks.
User experience is measured through simplicity of engineering, deployment, plug and play connectivity, the smooth coupling or decoupling of hardware and software, and a seamless and easy upgrade path. When properly executed, the result is lower TCO.
Efficiency of the engineering and operation system plays a critical role in every stage of a plant lifecycle. A well-designed engineering system reduces CapEx, lowers OpEx, sparks innovation in greenfield environments, optimizes brownfield performance, allows for seamless upgrades, and even helps shorten turnarounds. Efficiency starts from the way plant assets are engineered to the way the plant is operated and maintained.
●With quantitative comparison conducted in this exercise, key values brought by EcoStruxure Automation Expert V20.2 are:
■Asset centric and object-oriented design–helps process engineer to design the production process and avoid tedious and error-prone automation by automatically generating the foundation of the application.
■Heterogenous system diagnosis–helps a maintenance engineer fix a problem in a heterogenous environment to minimize the downtime and avoid waste of time for root cause analysis by providing a single and consistent diagnostic service for the entire multi-vendor system with contextual information.
■System agility empowered by hardware independence –helps define tailored architectures and control system strategies and enables faster modifications of the system to answer ever-changing business needs by providing a hardware agnostic application design. In addition, hardware independence offers greater flexibility for plant modernization and significantly reduces the dependency on hardware obsolescence, which reduces TCO and improves ROI.
●For those organizations ready to undertake the journey to high-efficiency engineering automation project execution, several short-term and long-term steps can be taken:
■Within the next month–Identify initial areas within the enterprise where engineering costs are high and where project delivery times are extended. Begin to seek out vendors who offer systems that are easy to adopt and that allow for phased transition to process optimization.
■Within the next 6 months–Secure funding for those projects that represent low risk and high return. During this time, begin to assemble a team of interested internal stakeholders.
■Within the next year–Implement your first new engineering automation system pilot. Track expenses and quantify benefits during the pilot and test period. Leverage vendors to fill in knowledge gaps where required.
●There are many plants operating today –and even under construction today –using inefficient engineering automation systems that fail to optimize engineering and operational processes. New, disruptive digitized systems like EcoStruxure Automation Expert are now available at an affordable cost to address these issues.
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White Paper |
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Please see the document for details |
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English Chinese Chinese and English Japanese |
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2021/5/21 |
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998-21022781 |
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353 KB |
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