Coal Age Magazine - For nearly 100 years, Coal Age has been the magazine that readers can trust for guidance and insight on this important industry.
Issue link: https://coal.epubxp.com/i/438053
stepwise implementation. "In today's business environment, a stepped or phased approach is often needed for fund- ing and efficient allocation of resources," he said. "Where I see companies failing is in their planning to deliver and sustain business value. Rather, plans are made to do the first phase, often to repair con- trols or add instruments, with the inten- tion that additional phases of the pro- ject will happen and support will be there when needed. "The fault in this type of planning is that benefits might take several phases and years to deliver, and the results are mixed due to a lack of proper support. I often hear from plant managers that they need to fix a piece of equipment or add an instrument before they can make any automation improvements. Such delays can represent millions of dollars per year in missed opportunities." ...Now Make it Work Right The investment has been made, but the system is not providing the results that were expected. What should an operator do to get it working effectively, Coal Age asked? "One key to continuous improvement is to ensure benchmarking is in place to understand the automation and equip- ment performance, so that one can prior- itize the limited resources used to fix the problems," said Jonas. "Today, there are tools available that provide insight and assist in the fixes. I believe these tools are under-utilized in our industry." "In general, even well-designed pro- cess control systems would benefit from additional high-level control," said Schilling. "It may not always perform bet- ter than human operators in the short term, but being programmed to monitor many more signals simultaneously and continuously will result in better long- term stability in the process, less wear on the machinery, and in the end fewer, shorter production stops. "Another, quite obvious thing to do, is to improve alarm handling," he said. "The aim is to reduce the number of alarms and make the few important alarms sharper and impossible to miss. Combined with root-cause analysis of the most common reasons for downtime, it should be possi- ble to provide the operators with better prewarnings to help focus on problems before they become critical." Yseboodt offered the advice that end users should be more demanding on per- formance and the right choice of technol- ogy with their EPC/contractor. This does, of course, require companies to have a better understanding of the latest tech- nologies, and to know what to use, where and why. Bagley agreed. "Operators should focus on increasing standardization, not only in the platform (hardware layer), but more importantly on the application layer of control system software," he said. "They should also be open to inves- tigating new concepts and be a critical listener when learning about potential advantages. In order for these mistakes to be addressed, they should clearly express any concerns about introducing a new technology into their specific operation." a u t o m a t e d c o n t r o l s c o n t i n u e d 38 www.coalage.com December 2014